How the Light Gets In - a novel by Louise Penny

I've been reading some detective fiction over the past few years and discovered several authors that I really enjoy.  Canadian writer Louise Penny is one of these authors and How the Light Gets In is her latest novel.

How the Light Gets In is Louise Penny's ninth novel featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sȗreté de Québec. Gamache is the head of the homicide department and the stories take place in the rural countryside of eastern Quebec province. The well-drawn characters and their relationships with each other develop over the course of the series, and reading a new Louise Penny novel is like returning to visit old friends.

Her latest story brings the reader back to the remote village of Three Pines - a village so isolated that it doesn't appear on maps and has no connections to the world of cellphones and the internet. Seventy-something Constance Pineault, a woman with more than one secret, is visiting a friend in Three Pines. "It had snowed day and night since Constance had arrived...she'd forgotten snow could be quite so beautiful...this was the snow of her childhood. Joyful, playful, bright and clean...It covered the fieldstone homes and clapboard homes and rose brick homes that ringed the village green. It covered the bistro and the bookstore, the boulangerie and the general store."  Enjoying the tranquility of the village, Constance muses that "perhaps like the snow, the tiny village had fallen from the sky, to provide a soft landing for those who'd also fallen." She leaves to return to her home in Montreal but promises to come back to Three Pines in a few days to celebrate Christmas there.  Some days later, Inspector Gamache receives a "missing person" call from Three Pines. Constance Pineault has failed to arrive. Attempts to contact her have gone for naught and Myrna, Constance's friend - a retired psychotherapist who runs a bookstore in Three Pines, is worried.

Gamache is having problems of his own as he investigates a leaked video of a raid in which several agents under his command were killed.  His antagonistic supervisor, Chief Superintendent Sylvain Francoeur, seems determined to dismantle the homicide department that Gamache has built over the years. Jean-Guy Beauvoir, whom Gamache mentored, is addicted to pain killers and working for Francouer. Only agent Isabel Lacoste has maintained her loyalty to Gamache: "The rest of the old guard had been transferred out, either by request or on the orders of Chief Superintendent Francouer." Gamache suspects something much darker than a leaked video is underway and is determined to resolve it before his career is totally destroyed by Francouer.

Gamache goes to Constance's home in Montreal. Upon entering, he discovers her body - murdered by a blow to the head. He learns that Constance Pineault is actually Constance Ouellet - one of the world famous Ouellet quintuplets and believed to be the last one alive. After their early fame, the quints built walls of privacy around themselves and have gone unrecognized for decades. Who would murder her and why?

An apparent suicide, a long-closed case of police corruption and brutality, a terrorist plot or two, the miraculous birth of the quints, the early death of one of them, their co-opting by a publicity-seeking doctor and the Canadian government in the midst of The Great Depression, surveillance and counter-surveillance, trust and friendship, unimaginable evil and heart-warming loyalty - all figure in this page-turner as it races to its heart-pounding conclusion.

Lousie Penny is a wonderful story teller. Her novels may remind you of Agatha Christie - one of the writers from detective fiction's "Golden Age" whom she credits with inspiring her.  I think she goes beyond those writers. Penny delves into the recesses of the heart and into the complexities of emotion and relationship. As she wrote in an article for the Shots Crime & Thriller Ezine: "My books are never about murder, or about blood. They’re about what happens in the marrow. The things we hide, even from ourselves."

Continuing in the same article, she wrote "I’m...one of the most competitive people I know. Not against others, but with myself. I wanted each book to be better than the last. And different. And I wanted to get better and better as a writer." How she will improve on this latest novel is hard to see. We won't have long to wait to find out. The tenth in the Inspector Gamache series is to be published in August.  


Links
Good Reads listing of books in Chief Inspector Gamache series

Shots Ezine article by Louise Penny