“The Cruelest Month” - Louise Penny

(Gamache book 3)

🐣 We return to Three Pines, a positively murderous little village tucked away an hour outside Montreal. A relatively new and seemingly much liked resident dies suddenly and under puzzling circumstances at the old Hadley House.

🐣 Gamache and his team face threats from within and without - enemies made during the old Arnot case have increased their attacks on Gamache’s reputation to an intolerable fever pitch. What is their game? All the machinations happening at the Sûreté made me anxious for the lovable Chief Inspector, but I never doubted him.

🐣 I confess I don’t know very much about it, but I love that Penny uses the Arnot case to tackle the theme of the Canadian government’s dark history of abuse and indifference toward indigenous people. You know that Gamache is on the right side of that battle! In this novel, the resolution of the Arnot case drama concludes a 3-book arc and takes greater precedence than the underlying mystery itself. Yet both were gripping.

🐣 I was fascinated by the psychological themes of the near-enemy; love versus attachment and pity versus compassion. The feelings are startlingly similar, and yet one carries an element of malice while the other does not. The thematic focus in the novel is on love: romantic, platonic, or simply the search for companionship.

🐣 Out of jealousy, one of the villagers quotes from Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”: “how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes”. Oh that we could all attain the Gamache-level of contentedness of being exactly where he is in life, and not where he wishes to be.