“A Better Man” by Louise Penny

It’s early spring in Quebec, and the ice-packed rivers are thawing. The combination of thick ice and thaw, snow and refreezing, is creating treacherous conditions, including an imminent threat of flooding. The situation is so bad in Montreal that dynamite is being used to break the ice-jams. In the village of Three Pines, on the Bella Bella River and near the Vermont border, the residents are sandbagging.

It's also Chief Inspector Armand Gamache’s first day back on the job at the Quebec Surete. No one can quite believe he came back; no one can quite believe he accepted a demotion to return to head of Homicide, replacing his own son-on-law Jean-Guy Beauvoir who’s leaving the force and moving with his family to Paris. As if to punctuate the bad feeling against Gamache, Twitter is alive with hate and personal attacks, including a clearly faked video. 

A member of Gamache’s team reports that a young woman is missing. She’s married to an abusive husband; waiting for to arrive at home, her father is frantic. The abusive husband denies any knowledge of his wife’s whereabouts; he says she’s likely run off with her lover. The couple lived not far from Three Pines, and part of the land is sliced open to relieve the pressures from the flooding. They find the woman’s suitcase in the mud. Then they find the woman’s body.

Louise Penny

It looks like an open-and-shut case, but nothing is ever what it seems in the Quebec of Armand Gamache. 

A Better Man by Canadian author Louise Penny is the 15^th in the Inspector Gamache series, and it’s a winner like its predecessors. Gamache is experiencing change and upheaval on all sides – his family, his job, what he thinks he knows about his colleagues – and Penny tells her story on several levels. 

It wouldn’t be a Gamache novel without help from his friends in Three Pines. Artist Clara Morrow is having an existential art crisis, brought on by vicious attacks on social media. Crazy and profane poet Ruth Zardo tries her hand at helping everyone’s social media problems. Gabri and Olivier are still running the bistro, handing out lattes and warm brioche (it makes one wonder how the characters avoid gaining weight with each successive novel). Ruth’s duck Rosa is still around, keeping her mistress company and shocking visitors with her four-letter quacks.

With a sub-story about the evils of social media, A Better Man is another great Inspector Gamache novel.

Related:

My review of Kingdom of the Blind.

My review of Glass Houses.

My review of A Great Reckoning.

My review of The Long Way Home.

My review of How the Light Gets In.

My review of The Beautiful Mystery.

My review of The Hangman.

My review of Penny’s A Trick of the Light.

My review of Penny’s A Fatal Grace.

My review of Penny’s Still Life.

My review of Penny’s The Cruelest Month.

My review of Penny’s A Rule Against Murder.

My review of The Brutal Telling.

My review of Penny’s Bury Your Dead.

“Glass Houses” by Louise Penny

It’s easy to think of the Inspector Armand Gamache mystery novels by Louise Penny as character-driven. Her dominant character, Inspector Gamache of the Quebec Surete, spans some 13 novels and has survived ambushes, shootings, nefarious plots and betrayals by his own police force, and more. His presence looms large in each of the Penny novels. But even her lesser characters are strong ones – Jean-Guy Beauvoir, Gamache’s son-in-law and second-in-command, Gamache’s wife Reine-Marie, and the residents of Three Pines – Myrna, Clara, Olivier, Gabriel, and especially Ruth Zardo the crazy poet with her duck Rosa.

Penny draws her characters so well that it’s easy to miss what truly drives her stories – and that is the story itself, what each novel is about. Glass Houses, her most recent book (published in 2017), exemplifies the power of Penny as storyteller. She alternates her story between a murder trial in which Gamache is being questioned by the prosecutor and six months earlier when the murder actually took place.

The story centers in Three Pines, the small (very small) village in Quebec, close to the Vermont border and not far from Montreal. This is where the Gamaches have made their home (Gamache has retired once, and then agreed to come back as the head of the Surete). It is here that one November day a cobrador appears on the village green, staring at Olivier and Gabriel’s bistro. Dressed in a body-long cloak and hood, wearing a mask, the cobrador says nothing. He, or she, or it, simply stares.

A few people in the village recognize what is going on. A cobrador is a myth-like figure known is Spain, someone hired to follow a debtor who won’t pay his bills, or really anyone who has done something wrong and won’t atone. A cobrador is a conscience. The question is, who is the figure staring at?

Louise Penny

Then there’s a murder. The body is found in the basement of the town’s small church. The victim has been beaten to death with a baseball bat, and the victim is wearing the clothes of the cobrador.

Back and forth Penney weaves the story, first in the courtroom and then in Three Pines. Slowly we come to see that the prosecutor’s badgering of Gamache has a purpose; there is a plan behind it, and Gamache is part of that plan. Something besides a murder trial, something far greater and more important, is going on. And that “something” is what drives the story of Glass Houses.

It says a great deal about the author that her stories continue to get better and better, when they began somewhere near the level of outstanding.

Related:

My review of A Great Reckoning.

My review of The Long Way Home.

My review of How the Light Gets In

My review of The Beautiful Mystery.

My review of The Hangman.

My review of Penny’s A Trick of the Light

My review of Penny’s A Fatal Grace.

My review of Penny’s Still Life.

My review of Penny’s The Cruelest Month.

My review of Penny’s A Rule Against Murder.

My review of The Brutal Telling.

My review of Penny’s Bury Your Dead.

Top photograph: In Spain, people actually work as cobradors, usually in connection with a debt collection agency. The cobrador in Glass Houses looks more like a monk with a cowl and mask.

“The Long Way Home” by Louise Penny

Chief Inspector Armand Gamanche has retired from the Quebec Surete. He and his wife have moved from Montreal to the village of Three Pines, not far from the Vermont border. Three Pines is the place Gamanche finds a sense of peace and rest, even though it has been the scene of so many murders investigated by Gamanche.

One of the Three Pines residents is Clara Morrow, an artist who rather unexpectedly became something of a sensation with a recent show in Montreal. Her husband Peter had been the nationally recognized artist in the family, until Clara’s show. And then it appeared she had surpassed him. Peter reacted badly, so badly that he tried to sabotage her work.

The Morrows had agreed to separate for a year, and then meet to decide if their marriage could survive. The year passes, and Clara hears nothing. Finally, she asks Gamanche to help find Peter. Gamanche asks his long-time Surete assistant and now son-in-law, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, to help. The clues are sparse. They discover Peter had gone to Paris, Florence, and Venice, and then to a small town in Scotland. The three cities make sense for an artist trying to find himself and renew his art, but a small town in Scotland?

Using what appear to be some very bad paintings left with Morrow family members in Toronto, Gamanche and Beauvoir continue their search. The closer they get, the more they find danger, and murder.

The Long Way Home by Canadian author Louise Penny is the tenth (of twelve) Chief Inspector Gamanche novels. As is Penny’s style and depth, it is an intriguing mystery, but it is also much more – a reflection into what is art, what inspires artists, and what happens when the muse flees. Or is killed.

Louise Penny

The residents of Three Pines themselves figure as part of the investigating team; it is one of their own who is missing. And Penny has created some of the most memorable ongoing characters in mystery fiction, including the psychologist-turned-bookstore owner Myrna Slater, the celebrated poet with the waspish tongue and four-letter vocabulary Ruth Zardo (and her wonderful duck Rosa), the café and bed-and-breakfast owners Olivier and Gabriel, and now also Reine-Marie, Gamanche’s beloved wife.

The Long Way Home is vintage Gamanche and vintage Louise Penny, an ugly story of murder, jealousy, and revenge told so beautifully that the ugliness is muted and controlled.

Related:

My review of How the Light Gets In

My review of The Beautiful Mystery.

My review of The Hangman.

My review of Penny’s A Trick of the Light

My review of Penny’s A Fatal Grace.

My review of Penny’s Still Life.

My review of Penny’s The Cruelest Month.

My review of Penny’s A Rule Against Murder.

My review of The Brutal Telling.

My review of Penny’s Bury Your Dead.

Photograph of the Charlevoix, Quebec, area by Charles Rondeau via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.