- #The kingdom of the dead by louise penny professional
- #The kingdom of the dead by louise penny series
#The kingdom of the dead by louise penny professional
Joe Talbert Jr., the protagonist of Allen Eskens’s prodigal son novel, THE SHADOWS WE HIDE (Mulholland, $27), follows that classic route, only to discover that the man he believes to have been his father was a nasty human being: a brutal husband, an unfit father and, as one person in the know puts it, “a jerk.” Being in sore need of professional redemption, Talbert, a young reporter facing a defamation suit, hardly needs to hear this. As always in this series, this one’s a lark.Įver since Oedipus, literary heroes have been searching for - or running from - their fathers, a theme that still bedevils many a mystery story. When their flighty charge takes off for a weekend at a country estate, the sleuths find themselves in a manor house mystery amusingly fitted out with chilly aristocrats, their family art collections (the Gainsborough and the Reynolds are quality goods, but “the Pre-Raphaelites are vulgar and virtually unsaleable”) and their hereditary ghosts.
#The kingdom of the dead by louise penny series
“Are you kidding? She’s a delight.” Not a delight, exactly, but another outstanding - and completely unexpected - character in a constantly surprising series that deepens and darkens as it evolves.Īs the only detectives in the Peculiar Crimes Unit, the partners are entrusted to watch over Monty Hatton-Jones, the key witness in a court case against a shady developer whose latest high-rise venture collapsed, killing some unfortunates. “A stoned former prostitute junkie who’s dealing opioids in the academy?” he responds. Should the girl have been admitted in the first place? Gamache pointedly asks the academy’s commander. Clogged with excrement, puke.” Here, she picks up a grittier subplot involving a young cadet who’s on the verge of being expelled from the Sûreté Academy. When Penny wants to darken the story, she shifts the action from the pristine village of Three Pines to inner-city Montreal, where the streets are vile. Typical of this author, the core mystery is a delicate matter and rather sad, something that draws the villagers closer together instead of tearing them apart. But there is no shortage of appealing characters in this series, from Ruth Zardo, an aged and delightfully rude poet and her equally foulmouthed pet duck, to Bertha, the cleaning woman, who may very well be the titled baroness she calls herself. “He relied on, and trusted, both his rational mind and his instincts,” Penny says of her avuncular detective, who is surely one of the most endearing specimens of his kind. Luckily, Armand Gamache, chief superintendent of the Sûreté du Québec, is on the scene to deliver comfort and establish order. But while the setting is entrancing, everyone knows that, “in the countryside, winter was a gorgeous, glorious, luminous killer.” And to prove that point, an old farmhouse collapses under the snow, trapping someone inside.
The temperature drops to a chilling minus 35 degrees, snow blankets the village green and neighbors trudge through the towering drifts to warm themselves by the fireside at the local inn. The pretty Canadian village of Three Pines is slumbering peacefully through the “long, long, dark, dark, Québec winter” in Louise Penny’s latest mystery, KINGDOM OF THE BLIND (Minotaur, $28.99), when it is suddenly hit by a blizzard.
0 kommentar(er)
