Dead Cold by Louise Penny is the second book in Penny’s Armand Gamache series, the setting is Three Pines which is a small village in Quebec. This book is absolutely full of twists and turns and kept me guessing right to the end, but apart from that it’s a great read all round.

Three Pines is described as something which looks like it has come alive from a Christmas card design. In fact I was thinking it’s like Brigadoon when that is exactly what the author described it as being like. This is the second Three Pines book which I’ve read and each of them has been set in freezing depths of a Canadian winter. I’m wondering if it’s ever summer in Three Pines.

Summer or Winter, I want to live there, more particularly I want to be sitting on the sofa opposite the wood-burning stove which sits in the middle of the bookshop, and going to Gabri and Olivier’s bistro for my lunch.

Anyway, the first sentence in the book tells you who is going to be murdered and by the time the deed is done I was just about cheering, because she was a truly ghastly character, a bullying egomaniac who was as shallow as they come.

But there are so many other great characters and relationships going on in the book. I particularly like Inspector Gamache and his wife, Reine-Marie, they’re very close and loving which is almost unheard of in detectives where divorced misfits seems to be the order of the day. Mind you, having said that I think that Maigret and his wife might have been a successful partnership, but it must be about 40 years since I read anything by Simenon so I’m not at all sure about that. Can anyone else remember?