Ready for Mother’s Day? How about books for Mom? Check out some gift ideas in A Mother’s Day Literary Brunch.
Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules and more teasers at The Purple Booker. Anyone can play along.
I always love reading a new book in Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series. In book 18, A World of Curiosities, Penny once again weaves a masterful tale that entangles readers in a web of intricate plotlines.
This time, we see threads converging from various sources and experiences in Gamache’s past, reaching back to his initial encounter with Jean-Guy Beauvoir and even further beyond the creation of the beloved Three Pines community.
What do a 16th-century painting and a lost-and-now-found grimoire have to do with the death of a woman ruled as suicide and the two children Gamache tried to help ten years earlier? And where is it all leading to? (I can’t tell you for sure, as it is all still coming into focus at this point in the story!)
With each turn of the page, readers are transported not only into a thrilling murder investigation but also into the intricate layers of Gamache’s personal history, the diverse characters of Three Pines, the stories and poems that Gamache loves, and a thoughtful consideration of misogyny and how it has affected Canadian lives in the past and still does in the present.
She lived, it seemed, at the place where the river Styx narrowed.
Louise Penny, A World of Curiosities
Summary
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache returns in the eighteenth book in #1 New York Times bestseller Louise Penny’s beloved series.
It’s spring and Three Pines is reemerging after the harsh winter. But not everything buried should come alive again. Not everything lying dormant should reemerge.
But something has.
As the villagers prepare for a special celebration, Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir find themselves increasingly worried. A young man and woman have reappeared in the Sûreté du Québec investigators’ lives after many years. The two were young children when their troubled mother was murdered, leaving them damaged, shattered. Now they’ve arrived in the village of Three Pines.
But to what end?
Gamache and Beauvoir’s memories of that tragic case, the one that first brought them together, come rushing back. Did their mother’s murder hurt them beyond repair? Have those terrible wounds, buried for decades, festered and are now about to erupt?
As Chief Inspector Gamache works to uncover answers, his alarm grows when a letter written by a long dead stone mason is discovered. In it the man describes his terror when bricking up an attic room somewhere in the village. Every word of the 160-year-old letter is filled with dread. When the room is found, the villagers decide to open it up.
As the bricks are removed, Gamache, Beauvoir and the villagers discover a world of curiosities. But the head of homicide soon realizes there’s more in that room than meets the eye. There are puzzles within puzzles, and hidden messages warning of mayhem and revenge.
In unsealing that room, an old enemy is released into their world. Into their lives. And into the very heart of Armand Gamache’s home.
