The Cruelest Month: 12/29/20

The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny is the third in the Three Pines/Inspector Armand Gamache mystery series. Clara and Peter, long suffering married artists join up with an Easter seance in the Old Hadley house. Of course someone related to that event ends up dead again.

In the vein of The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959), "it's the house!" Does every single book in this series have ties to that one house?

This murder happens earlier in the book compared the previous two. Padded around the seance death, though, is a whole bunch of meandering thoughts on Easter, Easter eggs, and angry mother bears. It's another holiday themed example of how Three Pines has the same passive aggressive community feel as a gated community with a strict HOA.

Like Dead Cold, Gamache spends much of his time fixated on the first piece of evidence without stopping to take in the bigger, obvious picture. The solution too, once Gamache is done with his wild goose chase is pretty much the same as the previous two books. Put bluntly, there's a lot of pent up rage in the families of Three Pines.

The fourth book is A Rule Against Murder (2008).

Three stars

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