A Trick of the Light: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel [Hardcover]

"A Trick of the Light" is the seventh novel in Louise Penny's Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series. Once again, we find Armand and his team interacting with the artist Clara Morrow, her husband Peter, gay B&B and restaurant owners Gabri and Olivier, Ruth the mad poet and others in the idyllic small village of Three Pines, where murder visits more often than unsuspecting strangers. This time, Clara is finally getting her due as an artist by being given a solo show at the very prestigious Musee d'Art Contemporain in Montreal, where she is terrified of the reactions of the art world at the vernissage, or private viewing party; following the very successful launch, she and invited guests return to her home in Three Pines for a dinner party. Unfortunately, an uninvited guest appears in the garden, dead; life becomes more complicated for Clara when she learns the identity of the deceased, a woman with whom she'd been best friends in childhood, whose nasty, belittling nature led to the destruction of more than just their own friendship all those years ago. Indeed, a great many people in the Quebec art world have reason to hate this woman and to want her dead, and many of those same people were at the vernissage and after-party. Inspector Gamache brings his second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir and his trusted Agent Lacoste to search out the truth, but Jean-Guy is still not recovered from the horrendous events of the last novel; physically, he may be healing, but mentally and emotionally, he is, as the poet Stevie Smith (quoted in "A Trick of the Light") says, "not waving but drowning." And Armand must resolve both the murder case and the deterioration of Jean-Guy while navigating the very treacherous waters of the art milieu.... I read the first six books of this series back-to-back a couple of months before this new one arrived and I was a bit worried that I'd so immersed myself in the first six without taking a break between books that I was overwhelmed by the setting and would find the seventh book, after some months of reading other material, disappointing. I'm glad to say I was mistaken in that worry; Louise Penny's characters, plot and village (in itself a character in these stories) are just as wonderful as I thought from the earlier books. My only regret is that, having bought this the day it came out, I will now probably have to wait another year before returning to a new story in the village of Three Pines. Very highly recommended; just make sure you've read the earlier books first!

Gamache and all the artists and art dealers in Montreal and a small Quebec village are actors in this story.

This book certainly makes sense if you know art, know volatile artists, the creative process, the drive of succeeding, the art of living by your wits.

Having the sane and direct Inspector Gamache around to be a guide, helps immensely.

My enjoyment of the book was great, but for many readers there are many aspects here of making art that could have been explored in more detail. It is called "'A trick of the light'" after all. Also, having read a previous Gamache tale '"Bury your dead"' first, certainly helps with the story line.

I put it away satisfied, but without the usual anticipation for the next book. All the magic of a new angle somewhere has left for me.

Clara Morrow, at age 50, is far beyond the age when most artists are discovered. Yet, on the evening this novel opens, she is about to enter the prestigious Musée d'Art Contemporain in Montréal for a preview of a solo show of her work. After working in her successful artist husband's shadow for decades, Clara has become an overnight sensation.

After the preview Clara returns to her idyllic Eastern Townships home of Three Pines for a celebratory party with her village friends, and artists, gallery owners and artists' agents from Montréal. In the category of friends are Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Québec Sureté and his second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir. Gamache and Beavoir have become acquainted with Three Pines and its quirky residents during their investigations of several prior murders. (Penny amusingly acknowledges the incongruity of Three Pines being simultaneously a place of art, friendship and warm hospitality, and a locale with a frighteningly high murder rate, by having bookseller Myrna describe Three Pines as "a shelter[, t]hough, clearly, not a no-kill shelter.")

The celebratory mood at Clara's Three Pines party doesn't last. Early the next morning, it is brought to an abrupt end by the discovery of the murdered corpse of a woman in Clara's garden. The woman is identified as Lillian Dyson, Clara's childhood friend who cruelly betrayed her while they were in art college. But what brought her there, when Clara hadn't seen or heard from Lillian in over 20 years?

Traditional detection methods of examining means and opportunity still leave Gamache and Beauvoir with a wide field of suspects. They shift their focus to motive, which reveals a huge gap between the type of person Lillian is widely reported to have been 20 years earlier and how she is seen contemporarily by her new circle of acquaintances. Gamache asks, over and over: "can people change?"

Gamache realizes that the question of Lillian's true personality is the key to the mystery, because only through understanding her nature can the investigators learn how she inspired murderous hatred and in whom. In the course of the investigation, Gamache and Beauvoir also confront the horrors they still live with as survivors of a deadly attack on their team the year before. The experience has affected Gamache profoundly, but it has not shaken his fundamental belief in people. By contrast, Beauvoir thinks: "The Chief believed if you sift through evil, at the very bottom you'll find good. He believed that evil has its limits. Beauvoir didn't. He believed that if you sift through good, you'll find evil. Without borders, without brakes, without limit." Though Beauvoir's name can be translated, literally, to mean "beautiful view," his actual view of people has become increasingly dark and embittered.

Clara's new-found success and Lillian's murder also bring to a boil the problems of envy and lack of understanding that have plagued her marriage for several years. In fact, envy is one of the deadly sins that is a persistent theme in this book, as greed was a theme in Penny's prior book, A Brutal Telling. This is what Penny does best. Her mysteries are not about forensics, timetables, alibis or violent action. They are about the human heart and spirit; about envy, resentment and fear eating away at people, threatening friendships, marriages, partnerships and even lives. But they are also about love, forgiveness and redemption offering hope for change and a forging of new, stronger bonds.

In A Trick of the Light, we see Louise Penny at the height of her powers. She is a master of characterization; a genius at creating a world that we enter into and fully live in, and want to return to. This is the most deeply satisfying book I've read this year and I have no doubt it will deservedly win many awards. Highly recommended.