Grouchy Ruth Zardo is still writing her poetry, the boys are still running the bistro, and Clara is still making her art. It’s Christmastime and the thermometer is registering low, but spirits are running high in Three Pines – even though another resident of the small town was murdered. The book is about the murder by electrocution on Christmas of the despicable C.C. de Poitiers, a character we love to hate. But it is also about the power of words and how they save and how they hurt. And it is about the agony of the people they destroy.

CC’s murder seems impossible: She was electrocuted at the curling match, in the middle of a frozen lake in front of dozens of witnesses. After Gamache gathers his team in the old railway station, Beauvoir recaps the only way CC’s murder could have worked: “A: she had to be standing in water; B: she had to have taken off her gloves; C: she had to touch something electrified; and D: she had to be wearing metal on the bottom of her boots.” Sure, nobody liked CC, but who hated her enough—and had the expertise—to pull off something like that? Chief Inspector Armand Gamach of the Sûreté du Québec received the call while with his wife – he was immediately headed to Three Pines where he’d investigated a murder the previous year. There had been another murder. Reading this during a steamy Australian summer is an interesting experience. Here it’s the kind of weather when you find yourself stripped down to barely acceptable clothing and opening the fridge or freezer a little more often than necessary. There, in the Canadian winter, you have to pile on the layers to try to retain what body heat there is, becoming barely acceptable in another ‘fashion’.

RECAP

I realise I am a rare dissenter here, but this book was so awful it made my teeth hurt. It is a book in which the values the story claims to be promoting (compassion, love, generosity, respect for human dignity) are actually entirely undercut by the text itself. I think ten years ago I would have fallen in love with this series, because the lies it tells about doing good and doing evil are told in such pretty prose, with all the symbols of cosiness -- wood fires and snowfall, old friends gathering around candlelit tables, poetry and music and books. But the book itself is false all through.

The story takes a number of twist and turns and, again, I can understand its appeal. But I did have a lot of trouble buying into the way the Three Pines murder occurred; it just seemed completely implausible to me and unnecessarily complicated. As one of the characters asked, why go to all that trouble? Why not simply shoot her or something? The book could well have been a novel about a small-town community without the murder mysteries to turn it into a picturesque magical, although imaginery, place. The author enhanced the story with multilevels of intrigue and suspense. For a small romantic village, there seems to be quite an extraordinary number of murders!Let every man shovel out his own snow, and the whole city will be passable," said Gamache. Seeing Beauvoir's puzzled expression he added, "Emerson." Another significant change involves Three Pines resident Bea Mayer (Tantoo Cardinal), whose Be Calm Centre shifts from a yoga and meditation center in the books to an ever-changing, Indigenous arts space in the series. The inspiration for Armand Gamage is her late husband Michael to whom she was married for 20 years. Taking place about a year after the events of the first book, which the locals are still marked by, the second novel delays the entrance of Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surete du Quebec, until Chapter 8. Gamache is a fine detective character: in his fifties, he is well-read, vice-free, happily married, and able venture into the minds of other people (even murderers) as well as his own. In addition to loving his work and his team of agents, he is always appalled by death and especially senseless killing. He imparts precepts to his trainees like: always ask when you don't know; never lie to me; listen so hard it hurts; and everything makes sense. Gamache is observant, experienced, wise, empathetic, and intelligent. He is also capable of mistakes, and his debonair man-of-reason second-in-command Jean Guy Beauvoir worries that Gamache is prone to trusting untested young officers (like the disastrous Agent Yvette Nichol in the first novel) to a potentially fatal fault--and he seems to be doing the same thing with young Agent Robert Lemieux in this book. In Penny's second mystery, we are introduced to the odious C.C. de Poitiers, a woman so vile and insufferable no one is sorry when she is electrocuted in a freakish "accident" during a Christmas curling match at Three Pines. Of course, the accident turns out to be no accident at all, and there are so many people who detested C.C., Gamache will have his hands full sorting through all the potential suspects.

This is another great story set in Three Pines. It involves the murder of truly horrible woman, which wouldn't interest me had it not been for the villagers of 3 pines and Gamache himself. It's funny and just great story telling. There is a point near the end of the novel where Gamache sits down to speak with Émilie Longpré, one of the three town matriarchs. It’s not surprising that they talked of life and death, considering Gamach is investigating a murder and considering the way-up-there age of Madame Longpré. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté and his wife, Reine-Marie, make their first appearance in the book on the day after Christmas, when they have a tradition of reviewing unsolved cases. “If I was murdered,” says Gamache, “I’d like to think the case wouldn’t just sit unsolved. Someone would make an extra effort.” (I love this man.) Reine-Marie notices that one of the cases is new: There was a bag lady who had hung out at the bus station for years—but was strangled outside of Ogilvy’s department store on the day Clara saw her there. Astoundingly, a copy of Ruth’s new book, signed “You stink, love Ruth,” was found with the body.I was also interested in the continuing story of Gamache’s stalled career. I feel that the surface has been barely scratched in this sub-plot and I’m so curious as to how it will play out. It’s the Sunset World of Trungpa’s classic Shambhala. A place of moral entropy. Welcome to the Hotel California!