A Fatal Grace: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel: 2

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By that time, Still Life had won many awards (including the Anthony, Arthur Ellis, Barry, Dilys, and New Blood Dagger) for Best First Novel, but not the Agatha; and we didn’t want to jinx anything by expecting her to win Best Novel for A Fatal Grace. Second in the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series, in which he's back in little Three Pines, Quebec, following the murder of a despicable woman who's recently moved to town for reasons unclear to all. She lives in a fake world of delusions of grandeur and any time she can bring someone down, for even the most trivial or no reason, she's going to do it.

I love the small village vibes, I love a lot of the characters there, the main Inspector and the French Canadian bits made me feel at home. The psychological analysis is all wrong; people don’t act like this, even if they are completely mean. Sayers and Agatha Christie, drew up a list of rules for crime fiction that included the following: “No clue that is important to the solution of the puzzle may be concealed from the reader. Obnoxious, cruel, -she was maddeningly bad news- to the people who knew who she was, but did not reveal the secret.Meanwhile, Gamache is astonished when Clara proudly shows him the Li Bien ornament Peter gave her for Christmas, which is exactly like the ball CC supposedly used as the basis for her garbled philosophy. CC de Poitiers was electrocuted in the middle of a frozen lake, in front of the entire village, as she watched the annual curling tournament. She might even have gone to her daughter’s end of term pageant at Miss Edward’s School for Girls, or ‘girths’ as CC liked to tease her expansive daughter. And while the book talked a lot about light Saul found it interesting and ironic that it had actually been released on the winter solstice. That would be more than enough to make me annoyed by this book, but its treatment of the 'good' characters is just as bad -- even worse, in a way, because the nastiness of it is so much more covert.

Hearing that CC knows important gallery owner Denis Fortin, Clara timidly asks if she would mind showing him her portfolio—which CC disdainfully throws in the trash. Although there were the trademark astute one-liners such as: It was almost impossible to electrocute someone these days, unless you were the governor of Texas, it was hard to feel sympathetic to some characters because I had read ahead. As Gamache and his Sûreté team begin digging through CC’s life, they cannot help but notice the truly Canadian surroundings, for this wretched woman died at a local curling event, having gripped the end of her chair, one that was seemingly attached to a sizeable generator. The cozy mystery, which aims to charm as much as challenge, has a graceful practicioner of that artful dodge in Louise Penny. The beauty of Louise Penny's auspicious debut novel, Still Life , is that it's composed entirely of grace notes, all related to the central mystery of who shot an arrow into the heart of Miss Jane Neal.With or without the unwelcome Nichol, the team has much to investigate: Where is Saul and what photos might he have taken of the curling match?

There is the psychological aspect of determining the murderer and motive for committing a crime while also immersing oneself in scintillating scenery and getting to know the personas over the course of this series. Maybe because he speaks French but Armand Gamache in figuring out clues before his team of detectives reminds me of a modern Hercule Poirot. As Gamache and the others notice the raw distaste that others had for CC, they cannot help but wonder why much of CC’s life cannot be substantiated.

Had CC de Poitiers known the end was near she might have been at work instead of in the cheapest room the Ritz in Montreal had to offer. Also, I enjoyed revisiting some of the villagers from last book: Gabri and Olivier- the heart-warming gay couple, Myrna- the librarian, Ruth - the cranky poet, Clara and Peter - the artists. He watches, he listens, and like me, he seems to suspect various possible perpetrators of the murder. I also marvel that someone like me, who is at least as much of a skeptic as Jean-Guy Beauvoir, can find myself wondering about such mysteries as lemon meringue pie.