Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Still Life (Armand Gamache #1) by Louise Penny

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Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is called out to the town of Three Pines, where artist and beloved local icon Jane Neal has been found dead. At first this appears to be a hunting accident; Neal has been shot with an arrow in the middle of the woods. But all is not what it appears, and soon Gamache is trying to decipher who, in this tight-knit and small community could’ve killed Neal. I’m not much of a fan of the whole cozy genre, and I didn’t […]

Brutal Indeed

The Brutal Telling by Louise Penny

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Read as part of CBR13Bingo: Book club. I’m part of a mystery readers book club that goes through the Gamache series.  Whoo is the title accurate. Throughout the book, I had a sense of where it was going to go because I’ve read enough of this series and I’m aware of why it is so popular (handsome guy who everyone wishes was their dad blows into charming, rustic village to solve the case) to take the liberty of assumption as I pour through it. But I […]

Reacquainting myself with Armand Gamache – #16

All the Devils are Here by Louise Penny

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This is the 16th outing with Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, and we meet him and his family in Paris, instead of their adopted hometown of Three Pines, Québec. All of his children, children-in-law, and grandchildren now live in Paris. Armand and Rein-Marie are enjoying their time together in the city where they were engaged, and that includes spending a lot of time with Armand’s billionaire godfather, Stephen Horowitz. After dinner one night, Stephen is injured in a hit-and-run, and in trying to solve that crime, […]

“who hurt you once before, so far beyond repair”

The Nature of the Beast (Inspector Gamache #11) by Louise Penny

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This is my first Inspector Gamache book without narrator Ralph Cosham. It took me a bit to get used to hearing Gamache’s voice in my own head without the aid of Cosham, but after ten books Cosham is Gamache’s voice for me and once I got started it all worked itself out. The tenth book, The Long Way Home, was a departure for both Penny and her characters and in some important ways this book is a return to form. We have at the core […]

Impending Doom

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The fifth book in the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series, The Brutal Telling is a murder mystery that takes place in the small town of Three Pines, where a man no one seems to recognize has turned up dead in the local cafe. The Brutal Telling has all the hallmarks of the series: an outsider is murdered, the peace of Three Pines is shattered, Inspector Gamache bestows his beatific smile on those who deserve it and saves the day. But for reasons unrelated to the […]

A Gamache Novella

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A moment of fair warning: I did not enjoy this Gamache story very much. However, I have come to find out that it was written for a good cause, and I feel a bit of an asshat for not enjoying it. Louise Penny wrote the book for an initiative put on by ABC Life Literacy Canada, which aims to increase life literacy skills. The Good Reads program specifically aims to have inexpensive and short books anyone learning English or English speakers learning to read later […]



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