How the Light Gets In

How the Light Gets In

By Louise Penny

Thought I'd end 2022 with a return to Louise Penny's page-turning Armand Gamache detective series.
This one is set at just about Christmas time, to boot.

There are three conflicts going on in this one. The event that brings Gamache back to Three Pines is the murder of Constance Ouellett, a member of the once-famous Ouelett Quints -- the first documented case of a successful quintuplet birth in the world. Raised in the public eye by the government. Constance and her sisters retreated to privacy in their last years. But Constance could not retreat from the trauma of her past, and had taken to seeing a therapist in Montreal. This turns out to be Myrna, the bookshop owner of Three Pines. Constance visited her old therapist/friend in Three Pines in December, with plans to return for Christmas. When she doesn't, Gamache returns to the village.

He brings with him some baggage of his own. His once-right-hand-man, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, is not with him. Instead, he's been transferred out of the Surete homicide division -- and, after a divorce from his daughter Annie following a return to addiction (Oxycontin), Gamache's life. Almost. Gamache is there in the wings, doing a little more than hoping for Beauvoir's recovery and return.

And then there's the "grand scheme", a plot by the head of the Surete and, it turns out, the minister of Quebec. It takes most of the book to learn what this scheme is; Penny is pretty heavy-handed on the foreshadowing and suspense. But it turns out that the two have for years failed to perform basic repairs and upkeep on Quebec's infrastructure, pushing it toward failure in the hopes they can pin the ensuing disaster on the Canadian government and ride a tide of independence fever to more power than they already have. The pair know that Gamache is working to foil them, and they are the ones responsible for the gutting of Gamache's department -- and Beauvoir's additction.

Gamache, though, has some aces up his sleep, too. And, once again, he outsmarts and outworks his opponents to victory. Don't think that's much of a spoiler. 

If mac'n'cheese is comfort food, the Gamache series is a comfort book. What fun to return to Three Pines and its cast of close-knit characters. Till next time...