The Cruellest Month: a Three Pines Mystery by Louise Penny by

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I have just put this book down and can recommend it as an absorbing fast read. It should appeal to fans of cozy mysteries, who will recognize lots of the elements they have come to love: a small, closed community, somewhat out of time and certainly eccentric; a group of friends and neighbors, apparently well-known to each other, but all with something to hide from their pasts, which gradually comes out under the stress of a murder investigation. The location and the lifestyle is apparently idyllic, yet always there is something evil under the surface like a canker in a rose. The Cruellest Month received a Starred Review from Publishers Weekly, and this is how they described the book: "Chief Insp. Armand Gamache and his team investigate another bizarre crime in the tiny Québec village of Three Pines in Penny's expertly plotted third cozy (after 2007's A Fatal Grace). As the townspeople gather in the abandoned and perhaps haunted Hadley house for a séance with a visiting psychic, Madeleine Favreau collapses, apparently dead of fright. No one has a harsh word to say about Madeleine, but Gamache knows there's more to the case than meets the eye. Complicating his inquiry are the repercussions of Gamache having accused his popular superior at the Sûreté du Québec of heinous crimes in a previous case. Fearing there might be a mole on his team, Gamache works not only to solve the murder but to clear his name. Arthur Ellis Award–winner Penny paints a vivid picture of the French-Canadian village, its inhabitants and a determined detective who will strike many Agatha Christie fans as a 21st-century version of Hercule Poirot."

All of these elements are there, and yet I thought that there was a great deal more complexity to the book. I saw similarities to the novels of P.D. James, and even Ruth Rendell. The book delves very deeply into the nature of love, loyalty, and jealousy. Chief Inspector Gamache is a very complicated and engaging hero. More complex and less of a caricature than Poirot, he has issues with his own past, as does James' Commander Adam Dalgleish, and the single-mindedness and secretiveness of Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley. He commands the loyalty of his team just as Inspector Maigret used to. At the same time, like these other detectives before him, he is gentle and sensitive with those who need his care and also supremely moral.

The icing on the top of this layer cake of a book is that at times it is extremely funny. Louise Penny pulls this off, I think, because she is such an acute observer of people. I had a little bit of discomfort with the ending, perhaps because I felt that after everything that went before it was a bit rushed and pat, perhaps because Penny was leaving room for a sequel. This book is part of a series though it can be read alone with no problem. Penny skilfully fills in the background without giving everything away. I just have to go back and read the earlier books to find out what went on in the Hadley house the last time Gamache visited Three Pines!