This slow reveal, sandwiched between the current cases, keeps me wanting to learn more, yet take a moment to see the protagonist develop before my eyes. In doing so, Penny has attracted a legion of enthusiastic readers who, apparently, can hardly wait for each new installment of the series to appear.

The cozy mystery, which aims to charm as much as challenge, has a graceful practicioner of that artful dodge in Louise Penny. It’s a perfect setting for the last job Saul intends to do for CC, who wants pictures of herself “frolicking among the natives at Christmas. She and her handsome husband, Peter, have been starving artists in Three Pines for years, although his precisely detailed paintings have finally started to sell. This time, one of the most hated villagers is electrocuted in the middle of a frozen lake during a curling match and nobody seems to have seen anything and at first sight the crime seems impossible. And Gamache, who finally grasps what it meant when the 78-year-old Mother loudly “cleared the house” at the curling match, suddenly knows how the murderer got away with it.These people never act silently; there's always an audience, so there's always a pay-off -- when Clara does an act of, again, basic human kindness (in giving Elle/L some food) she ends up believing that God has personally come to earth to reassure her about her art. Anyone with a single brain cell would see jumper cables clipped to a metal chair and their alarm bells would deafen everybody in the town.

There are some red herrings that I fell for and while I did correctly guess a few pieces of this one, I didn’t have all of the pieces figured out. Perhaps this is due in part to the approaching Christmas festivities, but certainly the removal of the town ‘bully’ must have something to do with the cheer. The only part of this book that I found a bit off-key was a moment between Gamache and one of the town's oldest residents, Em. There is the psychological aspect of determining the murderer and motive for committing a crime while also immersing oneself in scintillating scenery and getting to know the personas over the course of this series.

I like the way however the author has brought in elements outwith the particular crime that hint at past and forthcoming events in Gamache and his team's lives. Come sempre il villaggio di Three Pines e i suoi abitanti sono al centro della narrazione e aiutano Gamache a risolvere il mistero.

But still she seemed to grow fuzzy, then sharp, as though he was looking through a prism at two different women, one beautiful, glamorous, vivacious, and the other a pathetic, dyed-blonde rope, all corded and wound and knotted and rough. Only by talking with everyone will Gamache learn the events that led the murderer to commit this act. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page.Enter Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, a plump middle-aged detective from the Sûreté du Quebec, who initially finds it difficult to work out how CC was murdered when she was surrounded by fellow villagers. There are portions of this book that are so beautifully written they stick with the reader for months. All ten hairs on her tiny wizened scalp were standing straight up from the winter static in the house. As a reader, I was cheering for Gamache to solve the crime, but not because of the unlikeable CC de Poiters.