Jill Norgren Reviews a New Inspector Gamache Mystery: All the Devils Are Here
Reviewed by Jill Norgren
All the Devils Are Here
By Louise Penny
Published by Minotaur Books, 2020
(Chief Inspector Gamache Novel, 16)
Louise Penny has just given us the gift of another Chief Inspector Gamache mystery. All the Devils Are Here is the sixteenth book in the wildly popular Gamache series.
With this many stories under her belt, it is fair to ask whether Penny has succeeded in keeping her characters interesting and her plots compelling. All authors of series mysteries face this challenge: how to be inventive and avoid the predictable while writing about the same locale and using the same central characters. In her latest work Penny addresses the problem of too-familiar characters with too-familiar habits by changing the locale and many of the major characters. And it works brilliantly. Loyal series readers will enjoy a trip abroad while first time readers will have no trouble slipping into Gamache’s world.
Penny takes Armand Gamache away from his familiar Canadian home for a vacation in Paris. His grown children, Annie and Daniel, have relocated to the city of light. The Chief Inspector and Madame Gamache have flown there to be present at the birth of their daughter’s second child. But suitcases have barely been unpacked when the Chief Inspector’s wealthy godfather is targeted by a hit-and-run driver and the chase begins.
Penny has built the Gamache series around characters most of us would love as neighbors. They are caring, community-minded people. Jean-Guy Beauvoir works under Gamache at the provincial police force for Quebec. In a mid-series plot turn, he falls in love with and marries Annie Gamache. Other recurring characters are citizens of Three Pines, an idyllic village in the province of Quebec: painter Clara Marrow, bistro owners Olivier and Gabri, brilliant and eccentric poet Ruth Zardo and, of course, her pet duck.
But, as close as Gamache is to the people of Three Pines, they are not family and in All the Devils Are Here Penny has chosen to ask deep, often painful questions about our relationships with those sharing DNA and a family history. She explores both the nature of abiding love and the cause of being estranged while moving her characters around the streets of Paris, up the Eiffel Tower, into corporate offices, and down the stairs of a national library.
Penny has won a large international audience — her books have been translated into more than twenty languages — with books that pay as much attention to character as to plot. This makes them rich and well-paced. Gamache, the cop who refuses to be disillusioned, sarcastic, or unhappy holds it all together, but never on his own. He believes in the abilities of others and draws upon their wit along with his own. In Paris Penny lets Gamache draw upon the intelligence and skills of several women, including his wife, trained in library science. The scenes describing their work are among the highlights of this new book.
In interviews Louise Penny has said that she is drawn to writing about love and friendship, belonging, hope, and kindness. This could be cloying but, in her hands, it is not. There is blood and violence in her books but never unnecessary brutality or dehumanizing sex. There is evil but, always, justice. It is one of the pleasures of the mystery genre that it is sufficiently capacious to embrace so many styles.
For these difficult times, an evening with All the Devils Are Here is the perfect balm.
©2020 Jill Norgren for SeniorWomen.com
Jill Norgren is a retired member of the faculty of John Jay College, and the Graduate Center, of the City University of New York. She is the author, most recently, of Stories from Trailblazing Women Lawyers.
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