A Better Man by Louise Penny

Armand Gamache is once more surrounded by crisis and change. Amid massive flooding across Quebec, he is faced with an anonymous Twitter attack and a murder. Louise Penny portrays ills of our time: climate change, internet toxicity, and corruption in high places. Witty, gritty, and philosophical dialogue offer moments of relief.

The power of integrity, friendship and love act as strong counterweights to human failings. Gamache once served as mentor to a fellow agent who is also his son-in-law. Jean-Guy Beauvoir internalized the powerful values and practices of his former patron, and now passes on a trinity of questions to ask oneself before speaking. Stop and think: "Is it true? Is it kind? Does it need to be said?" Like the three tasks in a fairy tale, this practice carries strong medicine.

A surprising twist in this story reminds readers that things are not always what they seem. Police must avoid wrongly assuming an unpleasant and alcohol-damaged personality is also a criminal. And as humans, we must beware of the temptation to project our own darkness onto others.

In this book, as in contemporary society, families are divided by continents, by violence and by abuse of alcohol. In the midst of a catastrophic flood, politicians continue their infighting and worry more about how the decisions they make will affect their careers than how they can best save lives and property. The use of social media to deliberately form opinion about art and about the police is intended to enrich the opinion makers at the expense of creators and peace officers. Twitter users ruthlessly exploit the fact that social media is "less about truth than perception" and "people believe what they want to believe."

In the midst of all this, it is reassuring to think, along with Gamache, that "things are stronger where they're broken." Arising in Louise Penny's atmospheric Quebec, this idea reminds readers of the words of the late Montreal songwriter Leonard Cohen: "There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."

The Private Patient by PD James

Adam Dalgleish is going to marry Emma.  On asking her father's blessing, the couple are gently teased by the old man. Borrowing dialogue from Oscar Wilde, he inquires, tongue in cheek, about his prospective son-in-law's income and home. This delightful scene is interrupted when Adam's mobile rings.

The case he is must investigate is the murder of a post-operative patient in Dorset. The victim was recovering in "one of the most beautiful houses in England," now a nursing home. Emma is sanguine when her policeman fiance is summoned away. She rearranges her weekend plans to stay in London with her oldest girlfriend, recently married to her gay partner. Little do the three women dream of the unwelcome drama they'll soon face.

The pacing of this novel is exquisite. In the first third, we are lulled by the beauty and privacy of the nursing home where a well-known investigative journalist is about to have an old facial scar removed. She has finally managed to forgive her long-dead father for striking her all those years ago, and tells the surgeon she "no longer needs" the mark. In this early portion of the book, the violence done to Rhoda by her father is part of a distant past.

Meanwhile, before leaving London, Rhoda treats a friend to a meal. Watching her tease him over an expensive lunch, we sense that that she likes but does not entirely trust this handsome young man. Mild alarm bells sound in the reader's mind.

At the private nursing home in Dorset, the competent surgeon and the harmless-seeming staff feel soothing: likewise the beauty of the countryside, the tasteful decor of the manor and the delicious food served there. Only in passing do we learn that a young woman was once burned as a witch at the standing stones that flank the property.

Then the first shocking act of violence strikes, affording a glimpse of what lies beneath the smooth surfaces of the characters. From the points of view of several of them, we witness the papered-over pain and resentment that lie hidden. Once the detectives arrive and begin work on the case, death strikes again. And yet again. This middle portion of the story is fraught with terrifying urgency, and filled with confusion and uncertainty.

The author takes her time to wind the story down, leaving hints and ambiguities to make the reader wonder -- Am I missing something? Is someone else going to die? Was that strange confession true?

A masterfully told story by the renowned PD James, this tale has all the elements of a cosy and much more. It is smart, contemporary, and philosophical. One lovely moment comes when a retired lawyer responds to Dalgleish's comment that he is only a policeman, not an ethicist: "all civilized people must be ethicists." For me, that notion had a satisfying resonance. In this era of social upheaval, as traditional social contracts are being eroded and torn up around us, the only way out its in.

Tattoo by Manuel Vazquez Montalban

This translation is dated 2008; the original Spanish edition was published in 1976. Pepe Carvalho, a macho "ex-cop ex-Marxist" who once worked in Amsterdam for the CIA, is now a middle-aged private detective. This disillusioned maverick anti-hero used to love literature. Now he reads people, and uses one of his books to light the fire to cook a gourmet meal for Charo, his prostitute girl friend.

Paid to confirm the identity of a drowned man with a most unusual tattoo, Pepe follows a lead to Amsterdam, where he gets beaten up and tossed in a canal. Along the way, he drinks copious quantities of beer and liquor, eats at a fondly remembered Balinese restaurant in the Dutch capital, and despises the food he is obliged to order in inferior restaurants while pursuing leads.

The case proves even more sordid than expected; upon learning the details, he is shaken to the core. Fortunately for the gourmet detective, "the smell of frying tomatoes and onions" and the sight of a "steaming pot of mussels" makes life livable again.

Pepe is tough almost to the point of caricature. The "strange cinema he carrie[s] inside his head" portrays scenes of sex and violence, and in one real-life scene, he takes pleasure in a fight. A heavy drinker in a boozing culture, he can read stages of drunkenness in his informants and associates.

Although many of the characters the detective encounters are unappealing, all are beautifully rendered. The language in this unusual book is rich and vivid. Its evocative sensory descriptions locate the reader in the centre of bygone Barcelona, awash in food, alcohol, cigars, illegal drugs, and prostitutes. Amsterdam too is portrayed with clarity, as are the contrasts between northern and southern Barcelona beaches, and French versus Spanish coastlines when seen from the air.

In search of leads, Pepe interviews a tattoo artist, who explains that in the past, only "sailors and crooks" wanted tattoos. Now, sailors "aren't what they used to be," and crooks are getting too smart to mark their bodies with identifiable art. Only one good tattooist remains in Barcelona, he opines, and while there are still a few artist in Tangiers and elsewhere in Morocco, Hamburg and Rotterdam no longer live up to their pre-war reputations as the best places to get tattoos.

We get a powerful sense of the society and the era through vivid and darkly humorous descriptions and comments. About Charo, Pepe cynically observes that "in passionate solidarity mode," she becomes "a monument to class consciousness." In an effort to clamp down on illegal activity, the police close "all the brothels except the really expensive ones." Irritated by one young man's "self-satisfied grin of a jumped-up mafioso," the street-tough Pepe takes pleasure in the chance to clean his clock.

The reader senses the author's philosophy through the inner musings of Pepe Carvalho. who feels that his "journey between childhood and old age is a personal, non-transferable destiny" to be lived by him and him alone, and everybody else can "go and get stuffed." He looks back on the veterans of the Spanish Legion, "full of scorn and literature, setting off between the wars" on another armed adventure that "would never happen today," since people have now discovered "they can only do what's possible."

Lunching with two strangers from whom he hopes to glean information, the detective notices how one of them is "sacrificing an absent friend in order to keep in with the one sitting next to him." Pepe is soon bored with the men, finding their blind and belligerent expressions of nationalism stupid and unappealing.

In the era of women's liberation, the detective wearily observes the "geisha-like submission so typical of those liberated young middle-class women" as they invest their "pre-matrimonial enthusiasm" in "consolation prizes for unfulfilled ambitions." Cynically, he comments on the replacement of the "ancestral tradition of setting up a girl who had brought shame to her family with a corner shop" by its modernized version: "leasing a boutique for unhappily married women suffering from existential angst."

In the "green watery landscape" of the Netherlands, Pepe Carvalho observes the foreign workers "from a whole alphabet of poor European countries" where life is hard. He notices that the Turks, "fugitives from a dry country," have "lost their initial boisterousness and gradually accepted the convention of silence imposed by this part of Europe, where everything looked as though it were drawn with a ruler." Yet however civilized this northern nation may seem, Amsterdam is home to a secret and violent CIA organization awash with connections from Indonesia to Colombia.

Feeling "a rush of blind anger" towards both his own countrymen and the "phlegmatic Dutch cycling past," Pepe Carvalho is depressed by the thought that "Some are born to make history, others to suffer it." Luckily his body, which does not betray him, is at that moment walking him towards a fine restaurant called the House of Lords, where he will console himself with an excellent meal.

Born in a seedy Barcelona barrio as the Spanish Civil War ended, Manuel Vazquez Montalban was a poet and essayist as well as a novelist. By the time he died in 2003 at the age of 64, his 22 novels had appeared in 24 languages. His detective Pepe Carvalho lives on.

No Man's Nightingale by Ruth Rendell

Inspector Wexford is retired. In this latest novel in the series, his creator lets him have a look-in at a current case involving a woman minister called Sarah Hussein, who also happens to be a single mother of a seventeen-year-old.

Now a private citizen, Reg no longer has the powers of a "centurion" who is routinely called Sir or Inspector. On the other hand, he is now free to speak frankly to all those connected to the case, who talk far more openly to him than to his friend Mike [Burden], who is still a policeman.

Reg Wexford also has the perspective that comes with age.  Looking back over his life, he ponders how things have changed. Language flows steadily forward, carrying his daughter into middle age, marked by her use of outdated expressions like "flavour of the month."

The plot of this story is intricate, yet the social commentary is arguably more interesting, covering as it does the contemporary atmosphere of slowly evolving attitudes to class, to race, to language and to the precise levels of formality and usage that have kept an eroding social order in place.

In breaks between investigating, Wexford reads Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Enjoying the sonorous beauty of the antiquated language, he approves the author's advanced way of remarking the "absurd" attribution of "guilt and shame" placed by "imperious man" on an unwed woman. Equally, he notes Gibbon's ignorant and prejudiced certitudes.

Reg still writes letters, and he muses on the imminent disappearance of this old custom, along with so many others. Brooding over the social consequences of the contemporary ability a woman has to impregnate herself with donated sperm and a turkey baster, he does what he can to help the person who is shocked to learn she was born this way.

Unafraid to say what's on his mind, Wexford points out to his policeman friend that his summary of the Reverend Sarah Hussein's background is ''riddled with apologetic racism." A lover of language, he can't overcome his fascination at the steady march of the language of political correctness. In a humorous moment, Reg irritates his friend Mike by his inability to resist the temptation to keep commenting on his word choices. As the ex-policeman pontificates on the usage of the words hit man, henchman, and accomplice, readers smile at such agreeable imperfection. This is made all the more amusing when several days later, Mike jumps on something Reg says, taking the rare opportunity to demand, "'Who's a racist now?'"

Wexford shows calm diplomacy within his own family, with his daughter Sylvia and grandson Robin. He reads the boy's actions with a view to his age, and refrains from commenting when he observes that his middle-aged daughter, who has lost "an alarming amount of weight on that Dukan diet" [a reprise of a forgotten diet used by previous generations] now dubs "all even slightly overweight people fat." When he comments on her extreme slimness, she attributes this to envy; he forbears from telling her that at his age, he's more concerned with cancer.

Though language and culture changes, the class system stubbornly persists, though different in detail. The behaviour and speech of Maxine, the odious housekeeper, who wallows in gossip and racial slurs, seems typical of her position in the social hierarchy. She praises her immature and egotistic son, while denigrating her daughter-in-law for not knowing a woman's place. The author provides a satisfying foil for Maxine in the person of the replacement housekeeper, a modest and hard-working woman of Asian heritage, a blue-jean wearing mother of two accomplished children. Nevertheless, thinks Wexford, she shows his visitor into the room "with all the self-effacing meekness of a parlourmaid in Gibbon's own day."

Ever the observer of human nature, Wexford draws certain inferences about the new minister when he uses the antiquated phrase "How do you do?" which he himself has not heard for several years. I was intrigued to note that like many older Canadians, he is "uneasy with the metric system," and still thinks in feet and inches.

Certain pleasing ironies are woven through this story. Now that Reg is no longer a police officer but a private citizen, he is free not only to speak his mind but to offer comfort where it is needed. In sharp contrast to the resistance a policeman encounters when interviewing people, now everyone wants to confide in him. While Mike fears criticism in the press so much that he avoids being photographed in public eating or drinking while a murder case remains open, the situation is very different for Wexford, who observes how words that might once have "pierced to one's very soul" can now be "reflected on with wry humour" and "actually make one laugh."

Another important element of this rich book is a gentle meditation on aging. It brings the compensations of wide experience and perspective, even as it reveals the ignorance that drove certain past actions. Reading this recent wirj by Ruth Rendell felt like being plunged into a certain time and place even while feeling oneself moving with the relentlessly flowing river of life.