How the Light gets in -- will Inspector Gamache find a way to make that happen?

Cover Image from Louise Penny website

During this wonderful series of mysteries, author Louise Penny has moved the main players forward, forming them into deep and memorable characters.

Each novel has its own murder mystery, and the threads keep coming back to the tiny village of Three Pines, near Montreal. Now there's more.

This ninth novel in the series refines the already well-drawn characters further, as they slog through issues that continue to plague them from one book to the next.

But Penny has upped the ante plot-wise too, parlaying the mystery genre into a mystery/thriller with incredibly high stakes. His wife is out of town, and most of his old allies  have fallen away, but Chief Inspector Armand Gamache continues to pursue the chimera of some terrible and longstanding corruption in high places.

I'm listening to the CD series in the car, so I look forward to my next drive, even my next commute. On returning home, I find it hard to tear myself away from the story and get out of the car. Good thing the winter weather here is not as cold as it is in Quebec.

There's only one thing that worries me. What if this book is the last of the series? I've come to love Gamache and Reine Marie, Beauvoir and Lacoste, Clara and Myna and Olivier and Gabri. I sure hope this isn't the last of them, but if it is, I have a back-up plan. I'll go through the stories again in the form of the TV movies.

Louise Penny is a wonderful writer who balances her dark plots with the integrity, humanity and humour of her protagonists. She even has advice and encouragement for aspiring writers.

Three Souls by Janie Chang

Cover image from HarperCollins

In the summer, I was out of town and missed the launch of the historical novel Three Souls (HarperCollins 2013) by Vancouver author Janie Chang.

When the story opens in the small Chinese city of Pingyu in 1935, Leiyin is dead. For reasons she can't understand, she's been detained between realms. Though this world remains visible, she cannot participate in it.

Her companions in exile are her yin soul (romantic), her yang soul (disapproving), and her hun soul (philosophical and far-seeing).

Leiyin looks back on her life and tries to understand why the afterlife is closed to her. For rebelling against her father's dictums, she was punished by being married off to a simple man from a small town. This crushed her hopes of both a university education and the love of the revolutioinary poet Hanchin, a communist she met at a political lecture her father had forbidden her to attend.

She is deeply unhappy about being married off, but over time, she comes to accept her situation and find joy in the family she does have, rather than the romantic love she dreamed of with Hanchin. But when he comes back into her life as a political fugitive, she is tempted into rash actions, then crushed by disillusionment when she learns she's been used. 

Amid the political turmoil of pre-revolutionary China, Leiyin's impulsive passions have put her loved ones at risk, and she must find a way to remedy this. Before she can leave the shadow world, she must look deep into her own heart and find forgiveness, generosity and redemption.

Meanwhile, between worlds with her three souls, Leiyin discovers that she can communicate with those who remain in the world she's had to leave behind. Difficult and frustrating though this is, she must find a way to complete her unfinished tasks.

Loosely based on family stories the author heard many times in childhood, this book is a great read. I couldn't put it down, and neither could friends who read it. Way to go, Janie!

All the Colours of Darkness by Peter Robinson

Cover Image from Peter Robinson's official website

In Number 18 of the Inspector Banks series, Peter Robinson begins with a murder-suicide between two class-crossing gay men, and slowly begins to weave in suggestions that this case is tied in with the past of one of the men, Lawrence Silbert, who used to work for MI6.

Narrated by Simon Prebble, this story projects a dark atmosphere on the beauty of the Yorkshire Dales, and brings Inspector Banks ever closer to dangerous information he can reveal neither to his current lady friend, nor his trusted fellow officer, Detective Inspector Annie Cabbott.

In a break from the usual heavy plot line, Annie's colleague DI Winsome Jackman shares a few good scenes with Annie and gets the best of some petty criminals. Of course, she gets chewed out later by Chief Superintendent Gervase for risking her neck.

Meanwhile, when Chief Superintendent Gervase seems too willing to bow to pressure from the Chief Constable to close the case, Banks is suspicious he suspects that her boss is in thrall to political higher-ups. Naturally Gervase doesn't want this dangerous idea bandied about.

Constitutionally unable to accept gag orders or simple solutions, Banks continues to pursue the truth, even when doing so comes at great professional and personal cost. He also continues to resort to alcohol to help him cope with the dangerous and unshareable information that comes into his hands.

Silbert and Hardcastle are dead, but Banks pursues his "Othello theory," pressing a suspect for more information about exactly how the deaths happened. Then just as things seem to be looking up, more tragedy hits from a totally unexpected direction.

It's another fast moving thriller from master of suspense Peter Robsinson. And with a new twist: when this one is over, the reader gets the feeling it's not really over. Along with Inspector Alan Banks, we await further developments.

A Stranger in the Family by Robert Barnard

Book cover image from Amazon

Robert Barnard was an award-winning novelist well-known for his skill at plot-twisting "cosy" mysteries. A graduate of Balliol, he lived in Australia and Norway, published forty books, some under a nom de plume. He died in Leeds in September, aged 76.

This tale revolves around the identity of an adopted protagonist who finds out from his mother on her deathbed that he's not who he thought he was.

Kit was adopted when he was three and grew up as an only child in a happy home. His father, a Glasgow newspaper editor, was one of the Jewish children rescued from Nazi Germany by Kindertransport just before the war. His mother was a professor of Art History. 

After his mother's deathbed revelation that he is adopted, Kit follows her instructions and discovers the name and address of his birth family in Leeds.

Kit winds up his mother's affairs, then takes a break from his studies at the University and leaves the family home he now owns in Glasgow to go to Leeds in search of his birth parents.

His mother's greeting is lukewarm, and Kit soon realizes she's keeping something from him.  One of his newly discovered brothers is downright hostile to him, and his birth father, a Leeds lawyer now divorced, out of touch with his family, and suffering from Alzheimer's, has an altogether darker history Kit could have dreamed. That shadow implicates Kit's mother as well.

As it happens, the respectable and loving home provided by Kit's adopted parents comes from people with connections to the Sicilian Mafia.

In short, this novel sets a few old ideas on their ear. Blood does not tell, nor is it thicker than water. The apple falls a very far from the tree and nurture overcomes nature in the child-rearing stakes.

A talented but half-forgotten mystery writer, Josephine Tey

Cover image from the Arrow edition, 2002, from dooyoo

Josephine Tey was a nom de plume for this writer, as was Gordon Daviot. Born in Scotland as Elizabeth Mackintosh, she died in 1950.  Her series detective was Alan Grant.

Protagonist Grant spends this very original novel lying in bed recovering from broken bones sustained in a fall through a trapdoor, presumably while on another case.

As Inspector Grant lies in the hospital, with only two very different but equally strict nurses and a few visitors for company, he begins to sink into boredom.

Neither the theatrical gossip of his actress friend Marta nor the new but sadly uninteresting books she brings engage his attention. It is only when she comes up with the idea of bringing along a few posters of faces for him to gaze at that Grant's mind clicks into gear.

Gazing at the portrait of Richard III and showing it to the few others who come to his room,  he becomes intrigued when the face is perceived by the various people to be that of a judge, a polio victim, and a man with an unhealthy liver. Nobody sees the classic villain of history.

Marta provides a second boon for Grant's recovery in the form of the "wooly lamb," a curly-haired American scholar called Brent, who is whiling away his time doing research at the British Museum while his girl friend acts in a West End play.

With Grant as theorist, and Brent as researcher, the two-man team uncovers what Grant dubs (after a similar Welsh propaganda exercise) a Tonypandy, a massive misrepresentation of history by historians. The team uncovers the incredible fictions that were cooked up to whitewash other nasty historical characters and make Richard III, quite inaccurately, into a hunchbacked villain.

As for the old story of Richard killing the princes in the tower, some good research into primary source documents (by ordinary people of the time with no axes to grind) proves he cannot possibly have done it.

Josephine Tey demonstrates her knowledge of U.K. history. Against the context of the Welsh Tonypandy affair, her detective learns of a similar Scottish incident: putative martyrdom that was no such thing. Yet the monument stands and the story keeps being passed down, even after it's been proven to be another case of a dramatic historical misrepresentation.

As well as being a good read, this book is an impressive display of deconstructing history, long before this activity and the attendant word deconstruction entered the lexicon through academe.

Unusual seasonal bouquets

Featuring amaryllis and peonies along with seasonal berries and salal, this dramatic bouquet graced the central table in the reception area for Christmas at Hycroft.

 
Seen at the same event, this graceful arrangement also featured cotton bolls, along with orchids and other exotic blooms.

Winter bliss: magazines, crosswords, mysteries, cocoa

At this time of year, a cup of cocoa is the right drink to accompany a crossword puzzle.

The same warming beverage is also a suitable accompaniment to a spell of magazine reading, or perhaps a mystery novel, like this one by the delightful Josephine Tey.