I read this book on a weekend when it was far too cold to go outside (-25 Celsius) and it was a glorious experience to lounge in my snug and warm house while reading an icy murder mystery. This was my first Louise Penny, which seems crazy given that she seems like she’d be the Venn diagram centre of my love for a good detective novel and my patriotic love for Canadian Lit. The upside is that I’ve now entered Louise Penny’s world, and I’m going to keep a keen eye out for her other works.
Dead Cold, alternately titled A Fatal Grace, is the 2nd in Penny’s Inspector Gamache series, and takes place in the middle of winter in the Eastern Townships, which are a rural area outside Montreal full of city-dwellers on pastoral weekend getaways (picture the Hudson Valley or the Berkshires but for Montrealers). The town specifically is named Three Pines, and it’s a lot like the Gilmour Girls’ Stars Hollow, with some murder thrown in. While the weather outside is frightening, Inspector Gamache is concerned with the real horror, namely locating a murderer who has electrocuted the town’s most disliked resident in broad daylight in the middle of the town’s Christmas curling bonspiel. Aside from the quaintness of the village and the oh-so-Canadianness of the murder (small town Quebec! A curling bonspiel!), I enjoyed the rich and fully fleshed characters that Penny spends time developing- these characters have passions and motivations and interwoven relationships. In most ways, this book hit all of my detective fiction checkboxes: 1. Tied to its location/ a strong sense of place; 2. Neat and tidy plotlines; and 3. Compelling characters.
My criticisms are minor, and- at least in part- my fault:
- Not entirely a stand-alone mystery: There were several storylines and references that I didn’t understand because they came from the first Inspector Gamache novel, Still Life. I’m going to go back and read the 1st novel before I dive into subsequent ones, and if you’re new to Penny I’d suggest starting at the beginning too;
- The overly cute quaintness: Penny has written Three Pines to be a near perfect little village, and while I appreciate the juxtaposition she is trying to create (murder in a perfect town!), I was about ready for the descriptions of quaint perfection to end and the crimes to begin; and
- Some discord in language: In contrast to the quaintness of the town, and likely for the purpose of this contrast (or making the residents less like caricatures), some of the characters speak to each other in ways that felt jarring and- again, like my earlier review with the Faye Kellerman detective novel- unnecessary. I’m talking here about how some of the other characters, who are middle-aged grown ups, greet each other in large public settings with pet names like ‘Slut.’ I’m not against a good swear or slur where it fits (hello Deadwood!), but it didn’t quite fit here.