Over the past 14 years, Ms. Penny has written a saga in which both hero and author have grown in ability and assurance. A Better Man, with its mix of meteorological suspense, psychological insight and criminal pursuit, is arguably the best book yet in an outstanding, original oeuvre. We look forward to additional encounters with the dignified, inspirational Armand Gamache.
[Penny's books] straddle the tricky line between edgy and cozy, between horrifying and humorous ... Penny doesn’t deal in superficialities; no character, victim or perpetrator, is all good or all evil, once the depths are probed.
...the book promises far more than it fulfills. Another problem is that her recurring cast of eccentric supporting characters is becoming tiresome ... some...colorful, vivid prose ... Less convincing is the book’s depiction of the dead woman’s father’s headstrong attempts to kill his son-in-law, whom everyone presumes (without proof) to be the murderer. The psychology is sophomoric, and Gamache’s decision to coerce the father to stay in his own house (to protect the father from himself) is implausible. Even more implausible is an extraneous subplot about one of the recurring characters, a local artist named Clara Morrow.
Penny walks a tightrope over cozy territory with these characters and the quaint rural Québec setting of Three Pines. She takes a risk playing them off against the police procedural elements that dominate when Gamache and his Sûreté colleagues pursue their investigation, but she’s too good a writer to slip and fall. She uses these local characters to create brief, resonant moments of insight into the human condition, her true object of study ... brush strokes jump off the page ... Penny has a very distinctive writing style that first-time readers should be aware of—short paragraphs, frequent use of sentence fragments, repetitiveness. Sometimes it feels as though she’s assembling her thoughts from pieces of modeling clay, one chunk at a time...This uneven rhythm takes some getting used to, and it may be a little off-putting to readers looking for a smoother, more polished style of prose, but it’s part of what makes this author so successful at what she does. It conveys a thoughtfulness, a willingness to examine a situation from multiple angles, and a Clara-like uncertainty as to how the whole thing might be received ... a worthy addition to the Chief Inspector Gamache series, and her fans will love it ... Louise Penny is convincing proof that a Canadian setting, Canadian characters, and the Canadian point of view represent a deep, rich stratum in contemporary crime fiction that cannot, should not, must not be overlooked.
The first half of Louise Penny’s new Inspector Gamache novel is all about the weather ... Then something freakish for a Penny book happens: in the matter of sleuthing, the reader gets way out in front of the customarily infallible Gamache and stays there for most of the novel ... Gamache recovers in time to work some fancy deducing in the last chapters, just barely avoiding total narrative disaster.
...[an] outstanding new mystery ... Three Pines is (if you ignore the murder rate and annual snowfall) a cozy place to live, but Penny’s books can’t be dismissed as cozies, not with their philosophical bent and clear-eyed gaze at what happens when the human heart curdles ... A Better Man is another insightful examination of her motto: 'Goodness exists.'
This isn’t Penny’s best book in this series. There are too many references to 'if it were your daughter' and the ruse used to get Homer to Three Pines is simply silly. But that said, as a transition to a new set of stories and plot lines, A Better Man works. There is a twist at the end that will not please some readers but it is in character and manages to take us from the mud and snow of early April to the promise of better days and better men to come.
The appeal of this series and especially of Gamache himself has always been Penny’s ability to show her hero moving from the tangible, brutal facts of murder to the emotions within, the stories in the blood. There are multiple stories, often contradictory, to be found in the many-tentacled web of human tragedy and suffering that Gamache teases to the surface in this moving exploration of ties that both bind and destroy.
his title brings several character arcs to a close while resetting others to make this psychological mystery serve both as a beginning for new readers and a satisfying continuation for series fans. Gamache is an explorer of the human psyche, and the care he takes with the victims, their friends and family, as well as his own allows this series and his character continually to surprise, delight, and enthrall. Highly recommended for lovers of psychological, character-driven mysteries.
With an uncompromising eye, Penny explores the depths of human emotion, both horrifying and sublime. Her love for her characters and for the mystical village of Three Pines is apparent on every page.
