Summary
A #1 New York Times Bestseller, Louise Penny's The Long Way Home is an intriguing Chief Inspector Gamache Novel.
Happily retired in the village of Three Pines, Armand Gamache, former Chief Inspector of Homicide with the Sûreté du Québec, has found a peace he'd only imagined possible. On warm summer mornings he sits on a bench holding a small book, The Balm in Gilead, in his large hands. "There is a balm in Gilead," his neighbor Clara Morrow reads from the dust jacket, "to make the wounded whole."
While Gamache doesn't talk about his wounds and his balm, Clara tells him about hers. Peter, her artist husband, has failed to come home. Failed to show up as promised on the first anniversary of their separation. She wants Gamache's help to find him. Having finally found sanctuary, Gamache feels a near revulsion at the thought of leaving Three Pines. "There's power enough in Heaven," he finishes the quote as he contemplates the quiet village, "to cure a sin-sick soul." And then he gets up. And joins her.
Together with his former second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and Myrna Landers, they journey deeper and deeper into Québec. And deeper and deeper into the soul of Peter Morrow. A man so desperate to recapture his fame as an artist, he would sell that soul. And may have. The journey takes them further and further from Three Pines, to the very mouth of the great St. Lawrence river. To an area so desolate, so damned, the first mariners called it the land God gave to Cain. And there they discover the terrible damage done by a sin-sick soul.
Published Reviews
Booklist Review:
"*Starred Review* Until now, Penny's challenge in her best-selling Armand Gamache series was to imagine new ways to take the chief inspector of the Surete du Quebec from his Montreal home to the vividly evoked village of Three Pines, the author's setting of choice. Now, with Gamache retired to Three Pines, there is a new challenge: coming up with reasons to get her hero out of town. No challenge is too great for Penny, as skillful a plotter as she is a marvelous creator of landscape and character. Still grieving over the carnage that wreaked havoc with those he loves and with Three Pines itself (How the Light Gets In, 2013), Gamache reluctantly agrees to come to the aid of his friend, artist Clara Morrow, who is worried about her husband, fellow artist Peter, who has failed to return to Three Pines after their agreed-upon one-year separation. Gamache and his former assistant, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, follow Peter's trail to Europe and back to Toronto, where he visited his former art teacher, and on to the remote mouth of the St. Lawrence River. In search of artistic inspiration, Peter may have found something very different and much more lethal. As always, Penny dexterously combines suspense with psychological drama, overlaying the whole with an all-powerful sense of landscape as a conduit to meaning. The wilds of the upper St. Lawrence, once called the land God gave to Cain, combine echoes of mysticism with portents of evil, permeating the air with the same violent forces that roil within the characters. Another gem from the endlessly astonishing Penny. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Penny appears to have reserved a lifetime seat atop best-seller lists everywhere, and, with the appearance of her latest, she will take her place once again.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist"
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Publisher's Weekly Review:
"Officially retired, former chief of homicide Armand Gamache is at his beloved Quebec village of Three Pines, healing in mind and body after his ordeal in 2013's How the Light Gets In, when a neighbor, celebrated artist Clara Morrow, asks him to find her estranged husband. Peter Morrow, also an artist, had departed Three Pines the previous year, promising to return on a specific day to discuss the status of their marriage. He didn't make it and Clara is concerned. So is Gamache, who, as Penny has it, sees the shadow of murder even on sunny days. Thus begins a long, long journey during which Gamache, his loyal former assistant and now son-in-law, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, Clara, and some of the other delightfully eccentric villagers have an assortment of adventures. Cosham, who has been this series' narrator for a while, has a comforting, avuncular British accent. To this he smoothly blends in a French influence that becomes more apparent in his pronunciation of Canadian names, places, and Quebecois dialogue. Cosham voices Gamache with a wary, almost fearful caution as he approaches the new case, but as the search for the missing painter goes from Toronto to Paris to a desolate spot on the St. Lawrence River, his voice grows stronger as his energy level rises. Jean-Guy, too, sounds more assertive and alive. Cosham's vocal interpretations are mainly subtle-Clara, for example, doesn't sound very different from Gamache's wife, Raine-Marie-but his version of the village's eccentric old poet, Ruth, has a distinctive sharpness not unlike that of the latter day Katharine Hepburn. A Minotaur hardcover. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved."
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
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