The Cruelest Month - Louise Penny

The Cruelest Month (2007) is Louise Penny’s third Inspector Gamache novel. With the addition of 2020’s All the Devils Are Here, that popular series now numbers sixteen novels and one short story, The Hangman, which is published separately and rather generously called a novella by its publisher, so seventeen books in all.

Three Pines, a little Canadian village not very far north of the border with the U.S. is not long on entertainment possibilities, especially in the colder months of the year. For that reason, when someone with even a remotely unusual talent comes to stay in the village for a few days, Gabri, who helps run the local bistro, is quick to try to put them to work. This time around, he has convinced a visiting psychic to hold a séance to entertain the locals. Unfortunately, one of them ends up being entertained to death – and Inspector Gamache and his team are going to have to figure out why and how it happened.

Louise Penny’s Gamache novels more or less begin where the previous one ended, and although it takes almost fifty pages for Gamache to make his first appearance in The Cruelest Month, that is largely the case with this one, too. After making a quick determination that the victim was murdered and did not simply die of fright during the séance, Gamache and his team of misfit investigators are faced with the task of determining which of the tiny group of suspects had reason to kill a woman who seemed to be so universally popular. (As it turns out, at least half-a-dozen people who attended the séance that night will qualify as legitimate suspects before this one can be solved.)

The Cruelest Month is the kind of solid murder mystery that readers have come to expect from Louise Penny. It comes complete with multiple credible suspects and tosses out enough red herrings to keep most readers guessing to the end as they narrow down the list of suspects in their own minds. But Gamache fans are not necessarily there to solve a mystery. Instead, they are there to watch the brilliant Gamache do the hard work as they learn more and more about what makes the man tick, how his methods work, and what is going on behind the scene in his personal life.

Louise Penny

And then there is the core group of Three Pines citizens that readers, especially those who may have started reading the series halfway through like I did, have already learned to enjoy so much. We want to know more about people like Ruth, Gabri, Olivier, Myrna, and Clara, so the early books in the series now read to us more like prequels than anything else. We want, too, to learn why investigators like Isabelle Lacoste and Jean-Guy Beauvoir are so loyal to Gamache, and more about younger versions of Gamache’s wife and children. The Cruelest Month does not disappoint in any of this.

But personally, I will remain particularly fond of The Cruelest Month because of its introduction of Rosa, the duck who will be Ruth’s constant companion from this title onward. Who knew that Rosa ever had a sister called Lillian? Also, this is, I think, the first Gamache novel in which the Inspector seriously contemplates a life for himself and Reine-Marie in Three Rivers – either before or after retirement from the Sûreté. Gamache still has enemies in high places, men who are determined to force him to resign in disgrace because of how he exposed the corruption of a very powerful colleague of theirs. The problem is that, so far at least, Gamache is smarter than them – and much, much more patient.

Bottom Line: Don’t miss this one, Gamache fans. There’s a lot to chew on here.