A Fatal Grace - Louise Penny

A Fatal Grace is book two of Louise Penny’s Inspector Armand Gamache series, a series that has grown so popular over the last fifteen years that it will soon – with the publication later this year of All the Devils Are Here - total sixteen novels and one novella. Because I somehow managed to read nine books in the series before having read any of the first five, I am particularly enjoying the way that the early books are filling in some of the gaps in the way I’ve perceived Penny’s main characters. Reading A Fatal Grace was, for me, like reading a long flashback about some of my favorite fictional characters because this book takes several giant steps toward evolving those characters into the people I’ve grown so fond of in the last ten years.  

But let’s begin with the novel’s hook because it is a good one. CC de Poitiers, a truly despicable woman, has been murdered – although no one in Three Pines much appears to care – in what seems to be an impossible manner. She was electrocuted on a remote, frozen Canadian lake in the middle of a curling match, and nobody saw a thing. And that was that.

I suppose that because this is just the second book in the Gamache series I should not be surprised that the good inspector is not even mentioned until the book’s eighth chapter begins on page 54. Penny, instead, spends the first 53 pages reintroducing the reader to the main residents of Three Pines, a little village about an hour’s drive from Montreal where Gamache works and lives. (Series readers know, of course, that Gamache will eventually become a Three Pines resident and that some of these same characters will become his closest friends.) Gamache is already familiar with Three Pines because he helped solve a crime in the village, almost losing his own life in the process, just a year earlier. Now he is back to see if he and his team can figure out how CC de Poitiers could have possibly been murdered in plain sight without anyone noticing.

Louise Penny

A Fatal Grace provides a first-rate mystery for its readers to solve, one that becomes ever more complex as Gamache learns more and more about the victim’s past and how it all relates to some of the village’s oldest residents. And of course, that’s why we read murder mysteries. We want to solve the crime before the fictional detective gets it all figured out (this is one of the extremely rare times that I actually accomplished that), but fans of the series should pay particular attention to the developing relationships between the various characters, especially between Beauvoir and Gamache, but also between Gamache and the main Three Pines characters, and between the Three Pines characters themselves. There are lots of answers in A Fatal Grace to the questions readers may otherwise have to wonder about in the books that follow.

Particularly enjoyable, also, are the little asides Penny sprinkles throughout the first half of the book that explain Gamache’s investigatory techniques and his affinity for mentoring rookie investigators. For instance, in one exchange with a young cop who is on his first homicide investigation, Gamache had this to say:

            “You need to know this. Everything makes sense. Everything. We just don’t know how yet. You have to see through the murderer’s eyes. That’s the trick…and that’s why everyone’s not cut out for homicide. You need to know that it seemed like a good idea, a reasonable action, to the person who did it. Believe me, not a single murderer ever thought, ‘Wow, this is stupid, but I’m going to do it anyway.’ No, our job is to find the sense.”

Two of my favorite developments in the long term Gamache story come at the very end of A Fatal Grace: Reine-Marie, Gamache’s wife, makes her first appearance in Three Pines where she makes a positive impression on Ruth Zardo (perhaps every reader’s favorite series character), and the Gamaches unexpectedly return to Montreal with Henri, a Three Pines dog who loses his owner. The novel, though, does not end on an entirely happy note because Penny reveals that Gamache still has powerful enemies amongst his superiors, enemies willing to do whatever it takes to destroy Armand and his future.

Bottom Line: A Fatal Grace is a good mystery that can easily be read as a standalone, coming as early in the Gamache series as it does, but it will be even more special a book to fans of the series, both those who have read ahead and those who are reading the books in order. Don’t miss this one.