The Cruellest Month

I’ve done it again!

I get hooked on a series, and I have to read all the books as soon as possible, and then I when I’m all caught up, I have to wait until the next book is published.

Here’s the blurb for the latest of Louise Penny’s Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series, The Cruellest Month:

It’s Easter, and on a perfect spring day in peaceful Three Pines, someone waits for night to fall, they plan to raise the dead…

When C.I. Armand Gamache of the Surete du Quebec is called to the village the next morning he faces an unusual crime scene. A séance in an old, abandoned house has gone horrifically wrong and a villager lies still, spirited away - apparently frightened to death.

Gamache soon discovers that idyllic Three Pines not all is as it should be. Toxic secrets lie buried, and something fetid and festering has clawed its way out. And even Gamache has something to hide. He is shielding his team from a terrible truth. A powerful enemy within the Surete has planted a traitor amongst them. Who will betray him? And how far will they go to ensure Gamache’s downfall?

As usual with a Louise Penny novel, I’m swept in right at the beginning. I lose myself in the book and ignore all that happens around me. It gets to a point where my children gently start pulling my t-shirt, and I look up and an hour has gone by…and I reluctantly have to put the book down and go back to real life. I hurry along just to go back to the book.

The usual characters are in the book, it was nice to visit with them again. You learn more about their personalities and you either develop an attachment to them or you realize that you judged them incorrectly. Especially with the what this book deals with: jealousy! How throughout time it grows into dislike and it festers until it blows into something horrid and uncontrollable.

Halfway through the book I had a suspicion on who committed the crime, but I couldn’t wrap my mind around why this person would want to do it, but it made so much sense in the end. Then you have Gamache is experiencing, he knows that he has traitor in his group but he wants to catch him in the act, and unbeknownst to him he’s putting the people he loves the most in danger. And then that’s when the crap hit’s the fan! Wonderful scene! Loved it!

What will happen next? That I won’t know until the next book is published…hopefully soon!

The Cruellest Month by Louise Penny (4.5/5) Mystery; Published: Headline 2007; Series: # 3, Inspector Armand Gamache; Canadian Author; 100 + Reading Challenge (46); Library book;