The Cruelest Month: A Three Pines Mystery Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B0016NBV2Q | Format: PDF
The Cruelest Month: A Three Pines Mystery Description
Welcome to Three Pines, where the cruelest month is about to deliver on its threat.
It's spring in the tiny, forgotten village; buds are on the trees, and the first flowers are struggling through the newly thawed earth. But not everything is meant to return to life.
When some villagers decide to celebrate Easter with a s?ance at the Old Hadley House, they are hoping to rid the town of its evil - until one of their party dies of fright. Was this a natural death, or was the victim somehow helped along?
Brilliant, compassionate Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the S?ret? du Qu?bec is called to investigate, in a case that will force him to face his own ghosts as well as those of a seemingly idyllic town, where relationships are far more dangerous than they seem.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 11 hours and 46 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
- Audible.com Release Date: March 17, 2008
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B0016NBV2Q
Book Club Review
The Cruelest Month
Louise Penny
Our book club's book for March was THE CRUELEST MONTH, by Louise Penny. We decided on this book because it intersected two themes we have been thinking about reading. The first one was wanting to read a "cozy." The second was wanting to reading something either written by a Canadian or set in Canada. (We were talking about how close Canada is, and yet how little we really know about it. We have also read other Canadian mysteries, and have enjoyed them.)
This is (it turns out) the third in a series set in the fictional Quebec town of Three Pines. A beloved local resident--a cancer survivor who fled life in the big city for something more simple--dies during a seance, which takes place in the town's "haunted house." The investigative team led by Armand Gamache is called in to figure out what has happened. Was it murder? Can you literally scare someone to death? In the meantime, Gamache--who has blown the whistle on some terrible goings-on in the department--is the target of a cruel vendetta that seeks to ruin him, his family, and his career.
In some ways Three Pines is a sort of Quebecois version of St. Mary Mead, complete with all the delightful businesses and local characters that one expects in a cozy. But Three Pines is an update of that typical village; the author works hard at making the cast overtly "diverse," including a much-beloved and accepted gay couple and a black woman who runs the local bookstore. The investigation does proceed very slowly, with a psychologically perceptive but somehow not very satisfying conclusion.
This was a book that, as a club, we felt we really wanted to like, but we were left feeling disappointed, underwhelmed even.
A murder during a séance? It sounds a bit over the top, even as the centerpiece of a mystery novel. But if the author is Louise Penny and the investigator is Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Quebec provincial police, what may seem tiresomely gothic proves to be anything but.
In this third volume of Penny's Gamache mysteries, the Montreal-based detective revisits the tidy and obscure, but murder-prone, village of Three Pines, this time to decide if local resident Madeleine Favreau died of fright or was killed.
You can rule out fright.
As she did in the previous installment of the series, Penny mixes a stable of recurring locals with a few newcomers, including the murder victim and several potential suspects. But it is Gamache himself who is the most intriguing character in "The Cruelest Month," and the reason fans keep coming back for more. Compassionate, complex, thoughtful and a tad mystical in his outlook, Gamache is, at the same time, a seasoned pro with a stellar track record of solving murders.
Just as fascinating as the quest to identify Favreau's killer is the escalation of a behind-the-scenes campaign by conspirators within the S?reté du Quebec (as the provincial police are known) to destroy Gamache for the role he played several years earlier in bringing renegade officers to justice.
Penny first hinted at Gamache's professional troubles in "Still Life," the first book in the series, and she began filling in the missing pieces in "A Fatal Grace." But it is here that the reader's patience is rewarded with a more detailed explanation of how Gamache's principled stand fueled a drive for retribution.
The Cruelest Month: A Three Pines Mystery Preview
Link
Please Wait...