If If You Love Agatha Christie, You’ll Love This

The fourth book in her Chief Inspector Gamache series, A Rule Against Murder by Louise Penny was reminiscent of an Agatha Christie novel. It was one of several books selected by the Goodreads Kindle Book Club Forum for January 2024 reading and discussion. In 2022 I was reading my first Louise Penny book, A World of Curiosities, and it was a DNF for me which is rare. It felt like a lecture series I hadn’t signed up for. The difference between that book and Penny’s earlier book A Rule Against Murder was like night and day. I absolutely loved this book! I felt like I wanted to highlight every passage. I’m not sure if it’s because it was so beautifully written, or because I’d been starved so long for a rustic isolated setting with a big old inn, a cast of characters, descriptions of bumblebees, and magazine print reverse tattooing itself to a grasping guest’s fingers while reading in a chaise lounge. 

The setting was originally a robber baron’s huge old log hunting cabin converted into a Quebec auberge, or inn. Penny describes it, “And once a year men with names like Andrew and Douglas and Charles would leave their rail and whiskey empires, trade their spats for chewed leather moccasins and trek by canoe to the lodge on the shore of the isolated lake. They’d grown weary of robbery and needed another distraction. The Manoir Bellechasse was created and conceived to allow these men to do one thing. Kill. It made a nice change. Over the years the wilderness receded. The foxes and deer, the moose and bears, all the wild creatures hunted by the Robber Barons, crept away. The Abinaki, who often paddled the wealthy industrialists to the great lodge, had retired, repulsed. Towns and villages sprang up. Cottagers and weekenders discovered the nearby lakes. But the Bellechasse remained.” There was also the occupied historic Benedictine abbey of Saint-Benoit-du-Lac nearby.

A husband and wife have run the inn, Manoir Bellechasse, for many years which has as its current guests the well heeled dysfunctional Morrow family who’ve gathered for their annual reunion, and serendipitously, longtime visitors Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of Sûreté du Québec, the provincial police force for Quebec, and his wife Reine-Marie. 

When a body is discovered on the grounds, the innkeeper is terribly upset, because, as she describes to Gamache, “‘When my husband and I bought the Bellechasse we made a deal with the forest. Any death that wasn’t natural wasn’t allowed. Mice are caught alive and released. Birds are fed in the winter and even the squirrels and chipmunks are welcome. There’s no hunting, not even fishing. The pact we made was that everything that stepped foot on this land would be safe.’ ‘An extravagant promise,’ said Gamache. ‘Perhaps.’ She managed a small smile. ‘But we meant it. Nothing would deliberately die at our hands, or the hands of anyone living here. We have an attic filled with reminders of what happens when creatures turn against each other. It scared that poor child half to death and well it should scare us all. But we’ve grown used to it, we tolerate the taking of lives. But it’s not allowed here. You must find out who did this. Because I know one thing for sure. If a person would kill once, they’d kill again.’”

The first 86 pages of the novel are spent getting to know the cast of characters aka potential suspect pool, the setting, and underlying drama. By page 87 a body is discovered, and the remaining 286 pages are spent solving the crime which takes them in many directions, and culminates in a very tense climax where the body count could easily have escalated. Penny writes, “After years of investigating murders Chief Inspector Gamache knew one thing about hate. It bound you forever to the person you hated. Murder wasn’t committed out of hate, it was done as a terrible act of freedom. To finally rid yourself of the burden. The Morrows were burdened. And one had tried to break free. By killing. But how had the murderer managed it?” 

Penny has a new book in the series coming out later this year, The Grey Wolf: A Novel (Chief Inspector Gamache Novel Book 19), scheduled to release 10/29/24, so this new mystery may be an early calorie free Halloween treat for many.