“The Cruelest Month” by Louise Penny

This is the third installment of the Inspector Gamache series by Penny. While I did enjoy it well enough, I get the feeling that I am not long for this series. Every book feels similar, and the problems that I had with the various books (while small) don’t really seem to be going away. Allow me to explain.

First of all, there’s Gamache himself. He just feels like such a Mary Sue to me. What I mean by that is, he doesn’t really have any faults. His weaknesses are like, he’s noble, he’s loyal, he’s too trusting, which aren’t really faults at all. Everyone seems to love him, his assistant adores him as though he was his father, and Penny often mentions how he has an easy relationship with Clara Morrow, one of the people in Three Pines. He just doesn’t seem like a human character, and more of an idealized deity.

Related to that is the town. All of the crimes happen in Three Pines, which is always described as a sleepy, half-hidden town. But in just a few years, there have been 3 murders there (as in the 3 books). Is no one going to comment on this?! It’s just so unrealistic for a small town to do this, and of course that means that there’s several characters who are recurring and therefore definitely did not commit the crime. And also the description of the police officers in the town is always about how they appear to be living pretty well while working on this case. Every other detective novel has them killing themselves to solve it, but here it goes into detail about the lavish meals they eat in the town and the free time they have to chat with like everyone and go to the Morrow’s dinner parties.

This last point I’m slightly mixed on. Every book by Penny has been littered with literary allusions to the Bible and poetry and other works. I can see why book lovers love the series, and I appreciate them too. The thing is, they nearly always come from Gamache, which doesn’t really serve to deepen his character in any way. A detective with the time to be reading and memorizing all of this doesn’t seem like much of a detective to me. At the same time though, I do like that tone and style. So I don’t know.

I did rather like the ending though. Spoilers ahead, if you care, skip to the next paragraph otherwise. Nichol is finally redeemed in a satisfying way, and they wrap up the Arnot drama from the previous book. All of which I enjoy. So the strange thing is, I do kind of want to read the next book in the series, even though for the majority of the novel I was kind of unhappy with it.

So we shall see what happens. I may pick up the next one, I may not. Either way, it’s a well-written series, it just has a few fatal flaws that tend to compound on each other after a while.