Still Life and A Fatal Grace

 Still Life and A Fatal Grace

By Louise Penny

I read these two mysteries, the first in the Armand Gamache series, back to back, and they are blurred in my head. In the first, a beloved community member is killed by an arrow. The search for the perpetrator leads investigators to her house, which the victim had kept under wraps from even her closest friends for decades. The reason, it turns out, was that it had been covered in folk art that held the clue to solving the crime. In the second, a decidedly unbeloved newcomer to the community was murdered at a post-Chritsmas curling match in an unusual way: through electrocution. On ice. In a crowd. The subsequent investigation revealed it was the victim's daughter, who had endured enough suffering at her mother's hand and mouth that no one could blame her for the crime.

But it isn't really the plot that keeps me coming back to these novels; it's the characters that really draw you in. There's Clara and Peter, the resident artists, and Ruth, the curmudgeonly poet, and Oivier and Gabri, the owners of the Three Pines Bistro, and, of course, Gamache himself, a man of inscrutable integrity and kindness who is, we learn, on the outs from the rest of the Surete because of his attempts to hold a fellow officer accountable. It is this drama that weaves through all of Penny's books. This stuff is literary candy -- I'm looking forward to going back for more.