The murder took
place on Clara Morrow’s big night. An artist in her 50s who was finally getting
a solo show at the Musee d’Art Contemporain in Montreal, the place for anyone
in Quebec to become known in the art world. The genius of her work was finally going
to be recognized after her years of painful insecurity and hiding in the shadow
of her better known artist husband. The author has been nurturing Clara’s
development throughout her books. But then the body of Lillian Dyson was found
lying in the bushes of Morrow’s garden, the discovery putting a major damper on
Clara’s joy. Why Dyson? Why in Clara’s garden? Why on Clara’s big night?
The first clue
to the murder was the discovery of an AA token lying near the body. Could it
have been Lillian’s chip or did it belong to her murderer? Penny must have some
knowledge about the sobriety community because she took this crime story
through the heart of the 12-step program, borrowing heavily from the details of
the steps, the nature of alcoholism recovery, the types of relationships that
are formed among AA members, and she did it with style.
This is the 8th
book I’ve read by Louise Penny, the seventh in a 10-novel series. There are
many reasons that I keep coming back to her. Penny’s characters are real,
three-dimensional people. No one is all good and all bad, and each has his/her
own struggles with life, even Armand Gamache, the awkwardly named protagonist who
is the head of homicide for the famed Surete du Quebec. The plots are elegant
but not overly convoluted. These are not books that you can easily set down, and
the quality of writing is better than what we usually see in his genre. While I
would normally suggest that you start at the beginning of this series of novels,
Still Life, and work your way through
them, so you can enjoy the character development along the way, I can also tell
you that this is a stand-alone book. I think it’s Penny’s best yet, so jump in
here and you can go back and read the others later.
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