Louise Penny has been taking me on quite the rollercoaster with these last few books, but How the Light Gets In feels like my favorite part of the ride: the end. I know there are still several books left in the Inspector Gamache series but I think it may be awhile until I come back to them, because this one made me feel completely satisfied with everyone’s trajectory. How the Light Gets In tells two stories: Inspector Gamache is solving the murder of an elderly […]
A Step Back
Whoo, this book was a struggle. There have been other books in the Gamache series that I didn’t particularly love, but I barely finished this one. It felt like a chore. A Beautiful Mystery has Inspector Gamache and his right-hand man, Inspector Beauvoir, investigating a murder of a monk at an extremely secluded monastery. I know I complained about a previous book in the series having too much going on (the one where he’s investigating the murder of an archaeologist), but this one had the […]
A Return to Form
Throughout 2016 and 2017, I read the Inspector Gamache series as fast as I could (which wasn’t very fast. . .there’s a 2-3 month wait at my library for electronic versions of most of them). But when I got to book 6, Bury Your Dead, I stopped. I didn’t enjoy that one at all, and it was another 10 months before I felt like returning to the series with A Trick of the Light (well, 8 months, plus then waiting another 2 before I could […]
Character is not created in times like these. It’s revealed.
I read Still Life, Louise Penny’s first Inspector Gamache book, many many years ago, and while I didn’t gobble up the next several Three Pines mysteries, I have read most of them over the intervening years. The series, to me, is delightful but not essential, so I am always satisfied with what I read, but never crave more immediately. A Great Reckoning, to me, was quite different. Setting much of the action in the Surete Training School where he is the newly appointed Commander allows the […]