A Better Man by Louise Penny

A Better Man: A Novel by Louise Penny --- 437 pages including Acknowledgements. #15 in the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series.

The air is thick with anxiety as Sûreté du Québec agents gather in the conference room for the Monday morning meeting of the homicide department.

Today is Armand Gamache’s first day back since his suspension and then demotion from Chief Superintendent of the entire force, to his former  position as head of homicide. Complicating matters, he will be temporarily sharing the duties with his former second-in-command and current son-in-law, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, who will shortly be leaving to take up a new job in private industry in Paris. And taking Gamache's daughter Annie, and his grandson Honoré, with him.

Making matters worse, a storm of toxic social media attacks is being orchestrated against Gamache by his political enemies as he faces his first assignment – to find a missing woman, whose abusive husband is the immediate suspect in Vivienne Godin's disappearance.

The search for Vivienne is complicated by catastrophic spring flooding throughout Quebec. Ice jams are threatening the bridges, and the pressure of the water is threatening dams.  Gamache's own village of Three Pines is at risk, as the usually sleepy Rivière Bella Bella breaks its banks. A general emergency is declared and desperate efforts are underway to save towns and cities, dams and bridges and power plants from destruction..

As Gamache and Beauvoir lead the search for Vivienne, they develops a profound empathy for her distraught father. Vivienne makes them think of Annie. Suddenly the case becomes personal. Each is haunted by the terrible question, how would you feel, if it was your daughter, your wife?

As the rivers rise, and the social media onslaught rages, Gamache finds a body in the Bella Bella, just upriver from Three Pines. That close to home. The victim's father, overwhelmed with grief and guilt, becomes obsessed with vengeance.

Now the question nagging Gamache and Beauvoir shifts.

What would you do, to prevent your loved one's killer from getting away with it?

With each novel in the series, Penny just gets better and better. 

Click HERE to read the * review from Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from the Christian Science Monitor.

Click HERE to read the review from the San Diego Union Tribune.

Click HERE for the review from the Pittsburg Post-Gazette.

Click HERE to read the review from criminalelement.com

Kingdom of the Blind by Louise Penny

Kingdom of the Blind: A Novel by Louise Penny --- 389 pages including Acknowledgements.

The latest in Canadian author Penny's bestselling suspense mystery series featuring Chief Inspector Armond Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec, picks up just months after the conclusion of Glass Houses (2017) with Gamache still suspended from duty and under investigation for the actions he took to track down and eliminate a drug cartel bringing a potent new opioid into Canada.

 Now as a major snow storm in barreling down on the province,  Gamache and Myrna Lander, another recurring character from the small village Three Pines, and a seemingly guileless young man from Montreal, Benedict Pouliot, have all been summoned to meet a notary at an isolated, tumbledown old house some miles distant from Three Pines. There, they are informed that they have been named as executors of the will of a woman who none of them have ever met. The old lady’s death does not appear to be suspicious but the bequests in her will are so grandiose it would seem she must have been delusional --- except the notary is convinced she was not. When the executors meet the old lady's three adult children. they learn the woman's bizarre claims are founded on a contested inheritance dating back over a century between two branches of a wealthy Jewish family in Austria. 

But what seems at first like a pleasant distraction for Gamache turns serious when one of the old woman's adult children is found murdered under the debris of the collapsed house.

Meanwhile, Gamache and his team are still desperate to find the cache of lethal carfentanil that went missing somewhere in the city --- which Gamache deliberately allowed to go missing so as not to tip off the cartel to the trap being set for them.  Gamache's latest protégé, police cadet Amelia Choquet, found with drugs in her possession, is dismissed from the Academy and returns to her old life on the street, where she begins searching for the carfentanil. Her only lead: someone called David is getting ready to flood Québec with the drug. 

Another well wrought tale from Penny, who again walks the high wire balancing small town cozy and big city thriller.

Click HERE to read the review from Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus Reviews.

Click HERE to read the review from the Washington Post.

Click HERE to read the review from the Minneapolis Star Tribune.  

The Darkness by Ragnar Jonasson

The Darkness: A Thriller by Ragnar Jónasson; translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb --- 310 pages

A gripping new thriller by the author of the celebrated "Dark Iceland" series. This is the first volume in a new trilogy called "Hidden Iceland," and Jónasson is upping the ante by choosing to write the  three volumes in reverse chronological order.

The body of a young woman, a Russian asylum-seeker, is discovered by hikers washed up in an isolated little cove, halfway between Reykjavik and Keflavik.  After a cursory investigation by the Reykjavik police, the death is declared a suicide, and the case closed.

Over a year later Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdóttir of the Reykjavík police has just learned that she is being forced into early retirement at 64, to make room for a new hire, a much younger and less experienced man. Hulda is furious; she has been dreading compulsory retirement at age sixty-five, and now she is being forced out a year sooner. But before she leaves she bargains with her boss for two more weeks to clear her desk and a chance to solve a one last cold case of her choosing. Hulda knows which case: the Russian woman whose hope for asylum ended in the icy waters. Soon Hulda discovers that another Russian emigre vanished at about the same time, and that no one seems concerned or even interested. Even the other detectives in her division seem more determined to discourage and obstruct her efforts to reopen the investigation. Meanwhile the clock is ticking.

It's rare to find a woman in her sixties featured as the protagonist in a suspense thriller. Perhaps Jónasson  is being influenced by his background as the person who translated a number of Agatha Christie's classic mysteries into Icelandic. But his Hulda is not an Icelandic Miss Marple. Readers will find themselves rooting for Hulda as she battles the latent hostility and dismissive attitudes she has had to overcome as a woman in a male-dominated field. 

As in Jónasson's other books, the Icelandic landscape is an ever present "character" lurking throughout The Darkness. Readers will experience both Iceland's compelling beauty and its unforgiving nature.

In the "Nordic Noir" tradition, the plotting is precise, winding tighter and tighter as the suspense rachets up to a bleakly ironic conclusion. Only when looking backward can the reader see the tragic inevitability of a web so expertly woven to deceive. 

Click HERE to read an interview with the author from the Reykjavik Grapevine.

Click HERE to read the *review from Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus Reviews.

Click HERE to read the review from the Washington (DC) Times.

Holy Ghost by John Sandford

Holy Ghost: A Virgil Flowers Novel by John Sandford --- 373 pages

John Sandford’s Virgil Flowers novels are a spinoff from his  better known Prey thrillers starring Lucas Davenport. Virgil is a field investigator for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, who prefers to operate in the small towns and open countryside of  rural Minnesota, where he can bring his boat along for a little fishing on the side, and find interesting stories for his other, part-time job as a free lance writer for outdoors and hunting magazines.  This is number 11 in the Flowers series and it has all the trademark humor mixed in with the details of criminal investigation that distinguish Sandford's style.

Wheatfield, Minnesota was  drifting inexorably into oblivion until the Virgin Mary suddenly manifested herself before a congregation of elderly parishioners and Mexican migrant workers at the local Catholic church. Overnight it seems the town is inundated with pilgrims hoping to witness the miracle for themselves. The apparitions jump start Wheatfield's economy and many of the local inhabitants are happy to share in the profits --- especially the mayor and his precocious teenage sidekick, who have opened a store catering to the tourists right across the street from the church, seemingly overnight. Pretty much everyone in town is thrilled with how things are going. Until somebody starts taking potshots at the pilgrims.

When Virgil Flowers arrives and starts stirring the pot, all kinds of things begin rising to the surface. As Virgil soon realizes, nothing in Wheatfield is as simple as it seems.

Click HERE to read the review in Kirkus Reviews.

Click HERE to read the review in Publishers Weekly.

The Shadow District by Arnaldur Indridason

The Shadow District: a Thriller by Arnaldur Indridason; translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb --- 344 pages

Indridason, an internationally best-selling author of "Nordic Noir" crime thrillers, starts a new series, projected to be a trilogy, set during the American occupation of Iceland in World War II.  

His two detectives are Stephan Thorson (or Thódarson ) a Canadian Army investigator working as a liaison officer with a Reykjavik police detective called Flóvent. It's the bitterly cold winter of 1944 when they are assigned to investigate the death of a young woman found strangled in an alley behind the National Theatre, in an area known as the Shadow District. The case was never satisfactorily resolved.

Over sixty years later, an elderly pensioner living alone in a tiny flat in Reykjavik, is found dead on his bed, after a worried neighbor calls the police and asks them to check on him.  At first the assumption is that he died in his sleep of natural causes. But an autopsy proves otherwise.  A retired police detective named Kónrad who volunteers to work on cold cases for something to do, offers to follow up when the initial investigation turns up nothing.  Soon  Kónrad discovers some intriguing connections between the death of the old man and the unsolved crime from the war years, and realizes that to solve the present day crime he must finally discover the truth of the old crime.

Indridason is a master of his craft.  The second volume in the trilogy, The Shadow Killer, is due out next summer. Highly recommended.

Click HERE to read an interview with the author, Arnaldur Indridason, talking about his new series, from Crime Fiction Lover.com

Click HERE to read the review from Publishers' Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus Reviews.