Penny, For Your Thoughts

I mean, specifically, Louise Penny, extraordinary mystery writer, winner of over a dozen major mystery awards, author of the Chief Inspector Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec — Three Pines series of novels. Penny, herself a Québécoise living in a small town south of Montreal, has been likened in craft, quality and verisimilitude of her plots and characters to Agatha Christie, and who am I to say otherwise. I believe she has published nine of the Gamache–Three Pines books so far, and as of today, I have read all of them.

Her most recent novel, How the Light Gets In (yes, the name is from the Leonard Cohen song, used by permission and referenced in the book), is a real page-turner, resolving many of the issues developed in the previous several novels. A recommendation: it helps to read the novels in order; that's the considered opinion of someone who did not. Another recommendation to anglophones: keep a French-English dictionary handy. That said, these are the most satisfying mysteries I have read in a long, long time.