I’ve read some of Penny’s previous mysteries but not all of them and at times I felt like the new kid in town, someone who didn’t know the gossip in the neighborhood. Inspector Gamache has many demons, ones he accumulated in the earlier books. This contrast of beauty with darkness is what Penny is good at as she builds her characters, giving them all secrets. It is marked with a violent drawing of a woman riding a seven-headed beast, a symbol that becomes a critical part of the solution to the murders. She sets all of her books in one season and in this one it is glorious autumn, with, Penny writes, “the migration of the geese, and the prickly chestnuts ripening on the trees and the bobbing black-eyed Susans in bloom.”īut there is also Project Babylon, the giant supergun lurking in the woods. There was so much talking that I liked it when Penny took the action outside. Much of this novel is dialogue as Gamache and others interview suspect after suspect, or gather together to eat rich French food and converse.

She sets up a long list of suspects for the murder, which becomes two murders halfway through the book. Penny writes, “How many people in Three Pines were on their second or third acts? People had hidden depths, but they also had hidden pasts and hidden agendas. They are a diverse bunch and many of them came to the quiet village from elsewhere. This is Penny’s eleventh book featuring Chief Inspector Gamache and the characters who live in Three Pines. Fortunately, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, the former head of homicide for the Sûreté du Quebec, has retired to Three Pines and is willing to join the search for the murderer. In Louise Penny’s newest mystery, a nine-year-old boy is murdered when he discovers a giant missile launcher hidden in the woods. The lovely village of Three Pines, Quebec has delicious food, great scenery, and a very high murder rate.

Bull hid his weapon in the woods of southern Quebec and pointed it toward the United States.

In her newest book she incorporates the true story of Gerald Bull, a man who built a giant missile launcher called Baby Babylon. Canadian mystery writer, Louise Penny, sets many of her books in Three Pines, a fictional village south of Montreal.

Louise penny a better man summary