Customer Reviews

A Fatal Grace (An Inspector Armand Gamache -Three Pines Mystery #2)

5 star:		(37)
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3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(6)
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Readers of these excellent books need to be aware that Dead Cold and

A Fatal Grace are the same book - the first one is the British title

and the second the American title - otherwise, no difference! I made

the mistake of ordering them both.... it happens sometimes.

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his officers have been called back to the town of Three Pines. CC de Poitiers, an extremely unpleasant woman, has been murdered in public at the height of a curling match. Figuring out how she was killed is as much a mystery as uncovering who killed her.

Penny's books are deceptive. On one hand, they seem a simple traditional mystery, set in a small town with lots of interesting, quirky characters, lots of suspects from which to choose and good twists and turns along the way. Penny does do dialogue well and her sense of place is evocative. But then there a second layer, hard to describe, but one I find makes me occasionally stop and think while reading and stays with me long after I've closed the book. Penny is one of those I can be being on my very short list of authors to re-read. Highly recommended.

This is the second novel in my favorite new mystery series, and it's every bit as good as the first one. STILL LIFE introduced Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sureté de Québec, and he solved a murder in the colorful village of Three Pines, just a few miles north of the U.S. border. In this new mystery, he's back in Three Pines at Christmastime, looking for another murderer among the eccentric local population.

Every mystery series needs a good detective and a good setting, and Penny is better than most at evoking her small Canadian town and the vivid people in it. And Gamache is a memorable creation--I really hope we'll be seeing a lot more of him in the years ahead. Not since Agatha Christie's Marple and Poirot have I found such a likable crimesolver. If you enjoy good writing, fair clues and surprising solutions, you're going to love this series. Highly recommended.

I very much enjoyed "Still Life" but unfortunately "A Fatal Grace" is not nearly as entertaining. I had the same kind of experience reading it that one of the inhabitants of Three PInes, Clara, had when viewing the Christmas window in a department store in which she formerly had been completely able to lose herself: an unpleasant realization shattered the fantasy.

A psychopathic minor Martha Stewart is murdered in Three Pines at Christmas. She is a woman so horrible that most of the villagers have motives to kill her. Inspector Gamache of the Surete believes that the key to her death lies in her mysterious past which seems to be somehow connected to Three Pines.

The characters from "Still Life" reappear, but instead of being quirky and eccentric, they are now overdrawn black-or-white cardboard figures. The village is no longer just charming--it's greeting card perfect. Inspector Gamache, always too good to be true, is now a saint. Apparitions of God appear. The victim is an impossibly motivated woman with a literally unbelievable rationale. A subplot having to do with politics within the Surete is supposed to draw us further into the series, but really seems an unnecessary distraction.

However, Ms. Penny's work has moments of descriptive power and good humor, and I have to confess to enjoying the descriptions of Three Pines during the Christmas season in spite of myself. I hope her future novels return to the level of her first.

I won't describe the plot, because others have already done that.

Somehow the things I liked about the first book were over-emphasized in this second in the series: for example, the charming Quebec town (it's Christmas and snowing like crazy) comes across as too Thomas Kincaid and the psychological-philosophical talk was overdone. Worst of all, I had little trouble figuring out who did it and what the supposed secrets were well in advance of the police.

I also didn't like the way some characters are caricatures of bad while others are caricatures of good. Additionally, the emphasis on women's physical appearance -- particularly dress and hairstyle -- struck me as quite shallow in a book in which psychological and philosophical depth was intended. I wanted to say "a bad haircut or cheap clothes are not the worst thing in the world, and no indicator of character or intelligence"!

The coziness of the book was probably the most appealing part -- Quebec small town life at Christmas. I did have to laugh at the way snow seemed to be little obstacle to travel. I am from Chicago and know that even in the city, if too much snow falls in a short period of time, driving becomes next to impossible until the snowplows clear the roads -- and that happens first on major thoroughfares and only later on sideroads. Yet we have Gamache needing two other people to help him clear snow off his car, and then he hops into his Volvo and drives off. In your dreams, I thought -- he'd need to be driving a very different vehicle for that to happen.

This was an enjoyable read but a book I have already passed on for others to read -- unlike the first in the series, which will remain on my shelf for future reads.

"Fatal Grace" is the second in Penny's excellent series featuring Sūreté du Québec Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. Gamache returns to the small town of Three Pines when one of its residents is electrocuted during a curling match. It soon becomes clear that this was no accident, it was murder. Gamache discovers the victim, who is not liked by anyone, including her family, is not who she said she was. Slowly, but surely Gamache peels back layer after layer in his search for the killer. With each layer peeled away, he learns something new about the residents of the small town, about the deceased, and about the murderer.

As with all the books in this series, there are recurring characters. While you don't necessarily have to read the series in the order it was written, you will miss the joy of getting to know them as Gamache speaks with each one. While Gamache heads the investigation, his team, including a spy working for the head of the Sūreté du Québec, is instrumental in turning up pieces of the puzzle that Gamache finally puts together in order to discover who the killer was.

One of the things that readers will savor is Penny's ability to coin a phrase. One of my favorites from this book is when Gamache speaks about his deceased dog, "Gamache had had the impression it wasn't that his old heart had stopped, but that Sonny had finally given it away."

Penny's descriptions of the winter weather will have the reader inching up the thermostat so vividly does the author make the reader feel the bitter cold of a winter's day in Quebec.

This is one of the best series being written. Penny is in the same league as P.D. James, Charles Todd, and Laurie R. King. Don't miss this author and her series starting with "Still Life."

A word of warning - after thoroughly enjoying "Still Life" and "Dead Cold", I bought "A Fatal Grace" only to find that it was not a new book but "Dead Cold" (published in the UK in 2006) with a different title & a 2007 date of publication for the American market. There was no mention of this in the product information. I also fail to understand why we can't have the same title for readers in the UK, Canada, Australia New Zealand & the US.

I was attracted to this book because of its setting in Quebec, as well as its literate quality. However, though I found the book in some respects quite compelling to read, overall it seems that the author is not sure if she wants to be a mystery writer, a poet or a general novelist. The plot and subplots for both murders in this book are quite predictable, and the nuts and bolts of motivation for the murders are somewhat trite, thinly developed, and read more like a tabloid news healine than a well plotted mystery. Many "clues" and connections are conventional, and at times not really relevant to the mystery, while at other places there are significant ommissions in the groundwork for plot and character development, as well as no resolution for some pschological subplots that are started and then dropped. Finally, if you haven't read the prior book in the series, some of the references and character motiviations will not be clear. This book is written in a style reminiscent of PD James and her psychological approach to crime, and also reminds one of Donna Leone, but unfortuanely is not nearly as well plotted or developed as those other authors.

I loved Still Life, the first book in this series, and I was glad to learn that a second book was available and a third in hardback. That elation didn't last long. The quality of the first and second book seem to be reversed. How could the same author write that first wonderful book, and then write this. I know that authors take missteps, but so soon? It's like a bad, bad cozy with convoluted characterizations and inane dialogue. I'm on page 40 because I kept hoping it would get better. I can't take it. For example, the characters who seemed quirky in the first one, are just annoying in this one. Overdone and ANNOYING. The scene changes are not done well and just seem jerky. As I read, I find myself, wondering, "What?" Descriptions are unnecessary and some are just plain bad. For example, one person's sweater is described as being made of "cashmere or kittens." Please. There must be other ways to describe soft without making reference to dead kittens. Read this a direct quote from the book: "She trudged along the dark, snowy, congested streets, pedestrians bumping into her and giving her disgusted looks, as though fat children had spread their feelings like icing on slabs of cake, and swallowed them." What? I rest my case. I read the following somewhere and it fits here perfectly, "Life is too short to read a bad book."

It's been a year since our last visit to Three Pines. The big news in town are the new neighbors. CC de Poitiers and her husband and daughter have moved to the small village. Unfortunately, they aren't that popular, mostly because of CC's nasty attitude.

Someone has had enough. On Boxing Day and community curling game is interrupted when CC is electrocuted in the middle of the lake. So Chief Inspector Armand Gamache returns with his team to try to solve the crime. Who would go with such a strange method to kill this despised lady? Can Gamache overcome police politics to solve the crime?

I enjoyed the first entry in the series, and I was expecting more of the same here. Unfortunately, it didn't quite gel. I did still love the characters and find them compelling, although the residents of Three Pines had less of a role here.

The story started out very slowly with quite a few pages that seemed irrelevant to the story. While they did ultimately play a part, it wasn't enough to justify them. Once the story got going, I did get into it, and the killer surprised me. While the method was explained, it still seems like a bit of a stretch.

The writing was also a little weak. The author changes point of view in the middle of scenes frequently, one of my biggest pet peeves. Additionally, she often ended a chapter with Gamache putting something together, only to let us know what it was pages later. That got old quickly.

I've heard so much good about the series, I'll probably give it another chance. There were certainly parts of this book I enjoyed. Hopefully, it gets stronger from here.