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Just finished Louise Penny's latest book - "A Trick of the Light" - another volume in the Inspector Armand Gamache mystery series set in the mystical/mythical village of Three Pines in Quebec.
I feel like I've been emotionally gut-punched after finishing a Louise Penny novel. Her writing has such depth of character, compassion, and yet brutal honesty - that I find myself paradoxically wanting to race ahead and devour the book while at the same time wanting to delay and savor each page.
The inhabitants of Three Pines have taken on a literary life of their own - often shadowing the murder mystery with their own travails. Three Pines is a haven for misfits, but no Shangri-La! They are deeply flawed people, struggling with their relationships with one another in a hot-house microcosm, whose conflicts are accentuated and highlighted by a murder, in which they are again all suspects.
Penny allows each character to grow slowly from book to book - not only the main figure of Gamache, but also his subordinates and family, as well as the village denizens. Each book reveals more character, bad as well as good. These are human beings, capable of lying to each other, themselves, and to the reader.
A reader thus not only gets a well-plotted mystery, but another installment in the fascinating microcosm of Three Pines.
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