#4

I know I'm late to the party, but I'm really enjoying binge-ing Inspector Gamache!

A RULE AGAINST MURDER is the fourth installment of the Canadian mystery series by Louise Penny. This time most of the action takes place in a remote luxury lodge in the Quebec wilderness and not in the quaint and cozy village of Three Pines. Author Penny has a gift for words and developing compelling and complex characters. And in RULE, she crafts an intriguing murder mystery that kept me guessing not just “WHO done it?” but “HOW was it done?”

I enjoy Louise Penny's writing, plot and character development. But this book stars a family where the mother didn't want to be touched, a father who didn't want his children to take things for granted, and children who had always tricked, schemed, lied and cheated for approval. They had things but never love, or the perception of it. I don't like most of these characters, and even wonder if the author does.

I read Murder Stone 10 years ago and had forgotten the plot. The re-read was so enjoyable. The background to Gameche's character is all the more rich because we know him from later works. The dysfunctional rich family and the harm that fraudulent investment schemes do to the common man are very timely themes for this decade.

Fourth in the series and the best so far, possibly because it doesn't take place in claustrophobic Three Pines, but at a remote, claustrophobic resort on a lake during a Quebec summer. A dysfunctional, hateful family, resort folk with secrets, the affable Gamache, a tremendous thunderstorm and presto! a murder in paradise. Penny always portrays the darker aspects of peoples' characters, even "good" people, who (mostly) mask them and somehow manage to rise above them. Perhaps that what makes her books so readable despite the cloying village and its annoying inhabitants.

I'm ready the Gamache stories in order and enjoying a lot...I really get a feel for the characters Penny writes an excellent story, I love her plots.

Of course wherever Gamache goes, there will be a murder. This time, it's not exactly in Three Pines, but over the mountains a bit. Gamache and Reine Marie go to their favorite auberge to celebrate their anniversary only to find it full of a large family gathering to "celebrate" the patriarch by way of a statue. We knew it could only get worse when it turns out that Peter is a son of the family and Clara is the misfit in-law. Once again, made me very hungry to read about Chef Veronique's meals and I always enjoy reading about Beauvoir's discomfort among the Anglos (all crazy--and this case proves his point) and the 'wilderness' in which he has to work for this case--without a computer for goodness sake! Fun and satisfying.

I like the Inspector and his team and his family. I was sorry, though that we had to go back to the oh so precious Three PInes and its precious inhabitants. The Manoir Bellechasse was a nice change of setting for most of the book.

A good continuation of the series.