Tag Archives: Quebec

How the Light Gets In by Louise Penny

Posted on by
How the Light Gets In cover

How the Light Gets In by Louise Penny was published in 2013. It’s the ninth book in a series featuring Chief Inspector Armande Gamache of the Surete of Quebec. When I got to the end of it I thought it might be the last in the series but thankfully another couple have been written since this one.

I can’t say too much about this book because I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. The words ‘just brilliant’ are what come to mind – or ‘pure dead brilliant’ in Glaswegian. It isn’t a cosy comfort read in fact it’s quite stressful as just about everyone in the Surete seems to be against Gamache. Henri his German Shepherd dog is keeping him sane it seems.

I’ve been catching up with this series after getting to it late, it was Joan of Planet Joan who recommended the books to me as a great read – how right she was. In fact I think I will be reading the books again eventually, just to get my fix of the village and its weird but somehow very human inhabitants.

Louise Penny also chose to make her detective a decent chap who is very happily married, such a nice change from the usual cliche of a dysfunctional anti-social divorcee which so many other authors seem to prefer.

But it’s not just the characters and the setting which are so addictive, it’s also the twists and turns in the plot. What a page turner!

Dead Cold by Louise Penny

Posted on by

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?