![]() Re-inspired by her new direction, Penny tripped out of the gate by shooting for a perfect first draft. It’s an exploration of human nature, I hope.” “The books aren’t about murder they’re about life and the choices that we make, and what happens to good people when such a harrowing event comes into their lives. “I was feeling, like the rest of the world, fairly vulnerable and thinking that the world might be a dangerous place, and I wanted to create a place where there was a sense of belonging and community,” she recalls. Those tenuous, post-traumatic days even inspired where she would set her mysteries. I remember sitting on my bed looking at them and thinking, that’s it! I will simply write a book I would want to read,” she says. But among my pile of books were crime novels. “Like most people, I read catholically I read just about anything. Shortly after 9/11, a desultory glance at her bedside table helped dispel her ennui. The judgment of others has played a terrible role in my life for much of my life, and I became frozen,” she recalls. “I realized I was writing for the wrong reason I was trying to impress my family, my former colleagues-trying to write the best book ever written. But five years in, she was getting nowhere. ![]() Back in 1996, after jettisoning an 18-year on-air career with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and winning a 14-year battle with alcoholism, she’d retreated with her physician husband Michael to the Eastern Townships to try her hand at historical fiction. Who built it? How? And most importantly, why? It’s just the knotty puzzler to lure Gamache and his ever-inquisitive wife, Reine-Marie, out of early retirement.Ī similar unfathomable horror-the terrorist attacks of 9/11-proved to be a game-changer for Penny as well. When the boy’s body is found, the search for his killer leads authorities to the unthinkable: an enormous rocket launcher, expertly concealed, provenance unknown. In The Nature of the Beast, 9-year-old Laurent Lepage goes missing after annoying the townspeople yet again with another of his signature far-fetched stories, this one about a monster and an enormous gun hidden deep in the surrounding woods. Penny focuses as much on whether Gamache will overcome his demons as on whether his next demon will be his last. Penny’s 11th Gamache mystery, The Nature of the Beast, marks her largest first printing ever.Īs series devotees know, the brooding, wounded Armand Gamache left the Sûreté and retired to Three Pines after tearing the lid off of internal corruption in 2013’s How the Light Gets In, only to resurface last year, shaken but not deterred, in The Long Way Home. Publisher Minotaur Books says more than three million copies of the Inspector Gamache books have been sold worldwide since the series debuted in 2006, with growing sales and buzz for each new release. I think it’s facile for people to think that anything set in a village must, per force, be superficial and simplistic.”įar, far from either, Penny’s addictive series may be the quintessential anti-cozy, centered as it is on a village that bears more resemblance to Twin Peaks than Cabot Cove and an erudite chief inspector of the Sûreté du Québec whose demons are never far behind him. “I get very annoyed at anyone who calls them cozies, or even traditional. “To call them cozies is to completely misread!” she protests by phone from her home in Sutton, a French-speaking village in Québec, east of Montreal. The author erupts at the mere suggestion. Woe be unto the free-range American reader who casually picks up any of Louise Penny’s Chief Inspector Gamache mysteries, set in the French-Canadian village of Three Pines, expecting a “Murder, She Wrote”-style cozy.
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