Two short crime reviews

First up, How the Light Gets In by Louise Penny.

It's December, Christmas is fast approaching and Myrna, who owns the bookshop in Three Pines, has a visitor. Constance Pernault is a woman with secrets but she finds peace in the small isolated village in the middle of the Quebec forest and decides to return for the Christmas holiday itself. Before she can do so, however, she's murdered in her own home. Armand Gamache ends up with the case and he and Isobel Lacoste set about investigating without the help of Jean-Guy Beauvoir who, along with much of Gamache's faithful team, has been transferred out of his section. Events of the past few years, which involve corruption in the Surréte, are about to come to a head and Gamache is going to need his wits about him and all the help he can get, but who can he trust, and can he save Jean-Guy?

Oh, my goodness. Some books grab you by the throat and hang on while you ride the rollercoaster, gasping for breath, wondering if you'll be able to make it to the end intact. This is one of those books. It. Is. Intense. I thought the previous book, A Beautiful Mystery, was too but this beats it for intrigue and edge of your seat action. Of course it helps when you've been on the journey for so long, wondering as each book progressed when this backstory was all going to explode. In this, the culmination, it didn't disappoint. Wonderful. And I *really* want to go and live in Three Pines with Myrna, Clara, Ruth, Olivier, Gabri etc. Those forests must be amazing too, winter there must be quite an experience.


Next, Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers. This qualifies for Bev's Calendar of Crime challenge under the March category of, 'Money/Fortune/Inheritance has major role'. It is also my book 16 for Bev's Mount TBR 2019.

Out to dinner with his police detective friend, Charles Parker, Lord Peter Wimsey falls into conversation with a doctor on the next table. Dr. Carr's career is in tatters after he questioned the death of an elderly patient with cancer. Yes, she was terminally ill, but he felt her death was by no means imminent. Intrigued, Wimsey starts to look into it despite the advice of Parker who feels there is no murder to investigate: the autopsy had revealed nothing after all. But quite a lot of things don't add up. Who was the solicitor who arrived uninvited and was sent away with a flea in his ear? Why were two maids dismissed for no real reason? When the dead body of one of the maids is found in Epping Forest the police suddenly sit up and take notice. But this is one of those impossible crimes and the brains of Lord Peter Wimsey are required to figure it all out.

'My dear Charles,' said the young man with the monocle, 'it doesn't do for people, especially doctors, to go about "thinking" things. They may get into frightful trouble.'

This book is full of this kind of witty dialogue. Which is of course why Sayers' writing appeals to me so much. Plot-wise, there's an obvious culprit all the way through, and it's not so much 'whodunnit' but did anyone actually do anything at all and if so 'how?' and, especially, 'why?' So it's unusual from start to finish and I liked this very much as I wasn't sure of anything really. One death towards the end of the story hit me quite hard, it doesn't happen often. Usually the dead person is a Rum Lot and it's hard to conjure up sympathy, or it's someone the author hasn't talked about very much so you haven't got to know them, but this death was different and very sad. A warning... this book is very much of its time - the 1920s - and thus displays a few attitudes which we don't hold any more. I find it interesting to see how far we've come in almost a hundred years, but also hearing these things said takes me back to my childhood in the 50s and 60s when such attitudes were still held, although things were changing thank goodness. All in all, a cracking read. I still have 3 or 4 Wimsey's left to read but will mourn the loss of them when I've finished. Will try the ones written by Jill Paton Walsh then to see how they hold up.


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