Review of Louise Penny's How the Light Gets In

How the Light Gets In by Louise Penny

It may be summer for us, but it's December in Québec as How the Light Gets In begins. The story in this ninth in the Armand Gamache/Three Pines series picks up shortly after the predecessor book, The Beautiful Mystery, ended, and things are just as grim as you would imagine for Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, if you read that book.

Gamache's longtime enemies at the Sûrété du Québec are circling like sharks, taking bites out of his Homicide team. All of his team members have been moved to other departments, except for Isabelle Lacoste, and the officers moved to his team in their place are slackers, insubordinate and obviously playing for Gamache's saturnine enemy, Chief Superintendent Francoeur.

Jean-Guy Beauvoir, Gamache's second-in-command and closest colleague to both him and Lacoste, is now with Francoeur. Jean-Guy is a mess. Hooked on painkillers again, completely alienated from Gamache and broken up with Gamache's daughter Annie. Of course, all of this has been orchestrated by Francoeur and his compatriots. The sharks have isolated their prey and are coming in for the kill.

The Dionne Quintuplets

Considering what his office has become, it's almost a relief to Gamache when Myrna Landers, Three Pines's flamboyant bookseller, asks for his help to find a missing friend. This seemingly simple case unexpectedly becomes a last chapter in the story of Québec's most famous baby boomers, the first quintuplets to survive their birth. This part of the plot is obviously based on the Dionne quintuplets, whom the baby boomers among us will remember very well.

The Sûrété corruption plot that we've been following for this entire series takes center stage in this book, and it's a nail-biter that puts all of the characters under make-or-break stress. For those who have been wondering about the reach of the corruption and the long-term goals of its principals, this will be a particularly satisfying read.

What does this have to do with the book? Read it and find out.

Penny uses the corruption plot not just for thrills, though, but as a return to one of her perennial themes, good and evil. I remember back in A Trick of the Light, the seventh book in the series, there was a passage explaining the difference between Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir. Gamache always believed there was good in people, but Beauvoir was the opposite. Beauvoir believed that at bottom, you would always find evil, "without borders, without brakes, without limit."

Now Gamache, at his moment of crisis, wonders if Beauvoir was right, that maybe evil has no limits. He knows that it will be hard to find the impetus for the corruption, because most likely, it "started as something small, invisible to the naked eye. It was often years, decades, old. A slight that rankled and grew and infected the host." And now the infection is overwhelming.

Nathaniel Parker as Armand Gamache in the upcoming film of Still Life

Penny always manages to explore the themes of good and evil, love and hate, and sin and redemption without sounding preachy, because she does it through her particular strength, the character study. After reading all the books, and then going back and listening to the whole series on audio, I've come to know the characters as real people, with histories, strengths and flaws. I know their homes and how they live. Louise Penny writes so that there is no distance between the reader and the characters; their thoughts and emotions, what they eat and drink, how they interact with each other and, most important, how they react when bad things happen.

Penny is such a keen observer that it's all too easy to believe that you can travel to Three Pines, sit down at the Bistro and join in the conversation with all these characters, walk the green with them and watch the village children playing hockey, sit in Clara's messy house and enjoy a meal, browse for books at Myrna's bookshop and head upstairs to sit around the wood stove with a cup of tea and a scone. Hmm, there sure is a lot of eating and drinking that goes on in Three Pines––not that there's anything wrong with that! But there's more to it than that. Penny can also use a small moment to evoke poignant emotion, as when she has Gamache pick up a book at a murder scene, flip it open to the bookmarked page and see what the victim would now never read.

Louise Penny has transformed the police procedural and village mystery genres into not a mash-up, but something unique, original and genuine. Every summer, I look forward to my next visit with these characters, and at the end of the book I regret that my visit was all too short. I hope you'll visit too.

Note: How the Light Gets In will be published on August 27 by St. Martin's Minotaur. I received a free review copy of the book.

Book Review of Louise Penny's The Beautiful Mystery

The Beautiful Mystery by Louise Penny

One beautiful Saturday morning in September, Inspector Armand Gamache of the Quebec Sûreté and his closest colleague, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, are called from Montréal to a hidden island to investigate a murder. The island is home to a massive, stone monastery, built long ago by a small order, the Gilbertines, who fled to Canada to escape the Inquisition. (Much to my surprise, Beauvoir never makes a Monty Python joke about this. Do you suppose French Canadians don't watch Monty Python?)

Just two dozen monks live at the monastery, where they grow vegetables, tend chickens, cook, maintain the buildings and grounds and––most important––worship God. Their days are spent in near-silence, except for the hours they spend in prayer and singing Gregorian chants. All of the Gilbertines have a gift for singing and most were recruited from other religious communities for their singing talent.

Singing brought the monks together, but it also tore them apart. The murdered monk was Frère Mathieu, the prior and choirmaster. His recording of the Gilbertines' chants became a surprise sensation, bringing in much-needed money to the monastery but, with it, attention and demands from the secular world. Mathieu thought the attention was, literally, a Godsend; they could use the public spotlight to benefit the monastery and spread the word of God. But this would require the abolition of their tradition of silence and the loss of their solitary contemplative life on the hidden island. Dom Philippe, the abbot, and Mathieu's closest friend in the monastery, decided that these losses would destroy the Gilbertine order, and he ruled that there would be no further recordings of the chants and no public appearances by the monks. But what started as a difference of opinion between two friends grew to an enmity that split the community.

The crime reminds Gamache of the story of King Henry II and Thomas á Becket. Becket was Henry's Chancellor and, in that role, supported Henry's imposition of taxes on landowners, including the Church. Henry welcomed Becket's nomination to become Archbishop of Canterbury, assuming that his old friend would continue to back Henry's primacy. Instead, a years-long, escalating battle for church/state supremacy began that led to Becket's murder by four of Henry's knights.

Gamache remembers that, shortly before the murder, a frustrated Henry burst out to his men, "Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?" and that it appeared Henry's men took that as a command––or at least a suggestion––to kill Becket. Gamache wonders if something similar happened with the Gilbertines. Did one of the monks on the abbot's side of the schism decide that Frère Mathieu had to be eliminated to save the order?

What Gamache doesn't at first recognize is that there is a parallel to the monastery's schism much closer to home. For several years, there has been a venomous animosity between Gamache and Sylvain Françoeur, the man who is now the Superintendent of the Sûreté. The poison of their relationship has spread within the police force, causing rancor and distrust among colleagues.

Gamache and Beauvoir must stay at the monastery to investigate Frère Mathieu's murder. They fall into the rhythm of life at the monastery. More important than the monks' work is each day's prayer sessions. This is when the mesmerizing sound of the chants fills the chapel and seems to work a physical and emotional change in the listener. The book's descriptions of the chants and their history compelled me to listen to some as I read. (You can do it, too, by going to Pandora.com and searching for the Gregorian Chant music channel.)

In their quiet, deliberate way, Gamache and Beauvoir investigate on their own, without the rest of their team, with no internet access or forensics lab, without their families or any intrusion from the outside world. It's as if they are themselves cloistered monks, which makes it almost a peaceful time––until the investigation takes a turn and the plot's pace accelerates, building to a stormy climax. This intense closing promises much more drama to come in the next book for Gamache, Beauvoir, their colleagues and loved ones.


The Beautiful Mystery will be issued by Minotaur Books on August 28, 2012. Macmillan Audio will publish an audiobook on the same date, read by the incomparable Ralph Cosham. My advice is to clear your calendar, go find the Gregorian Chant channel on Pandora, and settle down to yet another compelling entry in the Armand Gamache series.




About the Armand Gamache series

In the Armand Gamache series, there are Three Pines novels, set in the small Brigadoon-ish village in southern Québec, and those set elsewhere in the province. Author Louise Penny must realize that if she set all of the series' murders in Three Pines, the villagers would flee like something out of a Godzilla movie. But, whether set in Three Pines or elsewhere, all of the books in the series have something in common. Each is set in a small community: from a village (Still Life, A Fatal Grace, The Cruelest Month, The Brutal Telling), to the Anglophone community of Québec City and its Literary and Historical Society (Bury Your Dead), to a remote country resort (A Rule Against Murder), to the circle of Québec's artists, dealers and critics (A Trick of the Light) and, now, a monastery.

There are benefits to a small community, like fellowship and support. But when something changes, that can disturb its equilibrium and cause problems that seem inescapable precisely because of the closed nature of the community. As Gamache notes, "murder happens because something changes." Gamache's job is to figure out what has changed, and which member of the community was so unable to cope with the change that he or she saw murder as a solution. Sure, Gamache and his team use traditional methods of examining physical evidence and alibis, but he believes that the murders he investigates were committed for very human reasons that must be unearthed to solve the crime and begin healing the damage caused to the community by the crime.

Does that sound awfully touchy-feely for a murder mystery series? Well, maybe it is, but one of the things I most appreciate about Louise Penny is her respect for murder; for the horror it visits on the community it touches, the damage it inflicts on the soul of the killer, and the ways the community finds to heal and move on after the wound of the murder. The people and situations she describes seem very real. So real that when I finish one of her books, it's as bittersweet as the end of an annual trip to visit friends, when I savor the pleasure of our time together and feel the pang of knowing that all the seasons will pass before we meet again.

Louise Penny

Notes: I received a free review copy of the book and audiobook. Many of the images in this post are taken from Louise Penny's website.