Great Reads for Great Readers

 

A World of Curiosities, by Louise Penny.

 

            Canadian author Louise Penny is internationally renowned for her series featuring Chief Police Inspector Armand Gamache and his trusted assistant Jean-Guy Belvoir as they battle crimes big and small in Montreal and its environs.  Her readers number in the millions, all fans of her great plotting and clever characters who reappear in each new story, and it shames me to say that this latest title is the first of hers that I have read.  So, where have I been all my life?!  Missing out on an excellent series of thrillers, that’s where!

            Monsieur Gamache’s latest display of his superior powers of deduction centres on the return to his home in the little country village of Three Pines of Sam and Fiona Arsenault, the adult children of murder victim Clotilde Arsenault, a local prostitute and drug addict.  She didn’t just sell herself;  it transpired that she sold her children as well, and kept a record of who did what to them:  the local police force were good customers. 

            After it was proven that Fiona killed her drugged mother as revenge for what she did to them, Fiona was tried and jailed as an adult, even though she was barely in her teens:  now she has served her sentence, earned an engineering degree, and returned to lodge with Gamache and his family. 

            The only fly in the ointment of this successful rehab story is Sam, her brother:  he loathes Gamache and takes special pains at every opportunity to show him the contempt in which he regards him;  Gamache knows in his very bones that Sam is anything but rehabilitated:  wherever he fetches up, grief and strife will follow. 

And they do, but first a seemingly unrelated quandary presents itself:  a mysterious letter is forwarded to one of the series’ permanent characters, writing of a false wall in the local bookseller’s loft:  when it is excavated a copy of a very famous painting is revealed behind the bricks – the Paston Treasure – or a very competent copy of it – is there, complete with tiny variations, spelling out a coded message for Inspector Gamache. 

‘I’m going to get you’

And

‘Time’s Up’.

Louise Penny has constructed a seemingly impossible plot to unravel;  there’s no figuring out in advance who, or how many, villains there are, but Gamache has been in the business of catching criminals for a long time;  he has many enemies – but none so clever and seemingly anonymous as his latest adversary.  What a clever writer she is, and how deprived I have been by my ignorance, especially when all her permanent minor characters are so winning, especially Rosa the duck:  she can quack at me any time!  FIVE STARS.