The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny

The Cruelest Month (2007) is book three in Louise Penny's excellent Chief Inspector Armand Gamache mystery series and as with all of the books in this series the setting is the fictional village of Three Pines, Quebec.  It's a charming place, off the beaten path.  Very few outsiders know of it but for those who reside there they would not want to live anywhere else. 

Certain residents of Three Pines we follow from book to book.  Clara and Peter Morrow, who make a living through their art work.  Myrna Landers who runs the local bookstore.  Ruth Zardo an elderly, famous and brilliant poet who lives in Three Pines for the privacy and for the fact that her neighbors accept her curmudgeonly behavior.  And finally Gabriel Dubeau and his partner Olivier Brule who own the local B&B and bistro where the town members often gather to socialize.  

These six characters are regulars in the series.  They appear in each novel as does Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his team of agents who work at the police headquarters in Quebec and they are used to solving big city crimes.  However, Three Pines despite its small size has a way of continually drawing Gamache and his team back to solve the  latest murder happening in their little town.  One would think Inspector Gamache would be exasperated by now but actually he loves Three Pines and has become friends with many of its residents.  

In the Cruelest Month the novel features two storylines.  There is the crime in which during the Easter weekend some of Three Pines' residents decided to hold a seance at the deserted Hadley House to exorcise the house's demons.  But something goes very wrong.  One of the participants in the seance, Madeleine Favreau, dies of fright.  The town is horrified and the thinking is that Madeleine had a heart attack but when the medical reports come back it turns out she was poisoned.

As Inspector Gamache tries to solve the case involving Madeleine's murder we come to the second storyline involving the Arnot case.  Years ago, Superintendent Pierre Arnot who was well liked among his fellow police officers in Quebec committed a terrible crime which Gamache discovered and couldn't ignore.  He brought Arnot to justice and Gamache's supervisors have never forgiven him for betraying a fellow officer and bringing shame to the department.  And so now as a way to bring Armand Gamache down, his boss, Michel Brebeuf, has planted a spy on his team.  Gamache is aware of who on his team is disloyal but what the reader knows and Gamache does not is that his best friend and boss Michel Brebeuf is in on the betrayal.  

And that is one theme of the book, betrayal and jealousy by people we thought we could trust.  Resentment began to build in Brebeuf over the years about all of the qualities that Gamache has that Brebeuf can never hope to match.  And that is true also of Madeleine Favreau.  She was a beautiful and accomplished woman who many admired and wanted to be around but for some closest to her it was hard to compete with all that perfection and jealousy and rage began to build there as well.

I really enjoyed The Cruelest Month and I would advise anyone who is thinking of beginning this great series to read it in order because these characters grow and change from book to book and in a few months (if not sooner) I will be on to book four, A Rule Against Murder.