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Originally Posted by poohbear_nc
In her Three Pines mystery series, Louise Penny has created a spiritual Shangri-La populated by deeply flawed misfits who have withdrawn from city life to inhabit a town not found on maps. Her detective, Armand Gamache, and his team of honorable but flawed homicide detectives visit this town during the course of their investigations into a wide range of murders. Gamache belongs to the class of detectives I call "decent men trying to function in a corrupt world by following their consciences."
Each book in this marvelous series ( http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/p/louise-penny) explores and develops the characters of both the townsfolk and the detective squad -- they meet, interact, and grow together as they learn to trust one another.
In book 5 (The Brutal Telling) Penny shattered the idyllic town by having a main character arrested by Gamache and convicted of murder [as if Jessica Fletcher had deduced that Dr. Hazlett was a murderer, and had him arrested by Sheriff Metzger and then convicted and jailed].
Her newest book, Bury Your Dead, incorporates this old case into a new case that has devastated Gamache and his squad. Now both the inhabitants of Three Pines and Gamache and his squad are shattered and need to find a means for healing and forgiveness.
This is a long-winded way of explaining why I regard "Bury Your Dead" as a truly magnificent work. Penny's writing is spare and intense. Her descriptions of winter in Quebec capture the bone-chilling sounds and sensations. Her description of a police funeral cortege in the snow will have tears pouring down your face. She can link her readers to the emotions of her characters as few mystery writers can. There are many mysteries running through this book, past and present. She makes you care about all of them.
This is the finest mystery novel I have read in 2010. |
Great review, thank you, I'll have to look for books by Louise Penny.
I'm sort of between books now, as far as serious fiction is concerned. Still reading the book on the crusades/jihad, plus a manga I borrowed at the library, and also some short stories by Olivier Rolin, a French author I discovered recently and enjoy a lot (as well as his brother Jean). In the first of his short stories he mentions Julien Gracq's
The Opposite Shore, which looks good but seems a bit hard to find. I hope they have it at my library, but I'll have to wait till this week-end to get it.