After wiping my emotional resources out with a book about the Native American genocide, I decided I needed a mystery to give myself a break from the emotional weight. Louise Penny’s A Rule Against Murder fit the bill.
Quebec Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is celebrating his anniversary with his wife at a luxurious lodge edged by a lake deep in the forest. A family there is also having what appears to be an uncomfortable reunion. The Morrow matriarch is married to her second husband, and her four children are in attendance: Thomas, Julia, Peter, and Marianne. Also present are Thomas’s high maintenance wife Sandra, Peter’s artist wife Clara, and Marianne’s ten year old child Bean (who out of some incredibly odd sense of spite on their mother’s part has never had their gender identified to the family). There are also sundry servants, including a Maitre ‘d, a defiant male server, a young female gardener and a fantastic cook who is secretly in love with the Maitre ‘d, despite their large age gap.
The matriarch, an unaffectionate and critical woman, has arranged for a statue of her late first husband, Charles Morrow, to be erected on the lodge’s land, it being a place the family has visited over the years. The father is a complicated figure, with most of his children having been desperate for his love, while their father was consumed with worries that his children would squander any fortune he gave or left them, so he rarely bestowed any money on them, though they wanted for nothing.
Gamache and his wife are on the edges as observers, welcoming with delight Peter and Clara, who are friends of theirs. Gamache is soon called to take on his role as Chief Inspector when one of the family is crushed and killed by the newly erected statue. It is not only a case of who and why, but also one of how, given the sheer weight of the statue.
I read Penny’s first mystery a long time ago, and remember not being that impressed. Gamache seemed very idealized, and it is no different in this, her fourth book. He is gentle, insightful, a natural leader, and intelligent. He and his wife are deeply in love, even though they have been married over thirty years. I have no objections to loving relationships, but it did lend a sort of “perfect man” to the proceedings.
As Gamache and his team investigate the murder, they discover the Morrows are rife with poisonous secrets and fraught relationships. It is a story of love, hate, misunderstandings, repression, understanding, pain, and reconciling the past. Throughout it all, Gamache steadily and methodically uncovers motivations and clues, which lead to a satisfying ending. I enjoyed this book much more than Penny’s earlier mystery–the characters are not the caricatures I experienced in her first book–and may pick another one up in her long series.