A Fatal Grace (Chief Inspector Gamache)

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Had CC de Poitiers known the end was near she might have been at work instead of in the cheapest room the Ritz in Montreal had to offer.

What it comes down to, I guess, is that I'm just one of those people who would much rather spend a night hanging out with Matt and Mick Ballou, drinking a good Irish whiskey at Grogan's Open House than I would sitting around a pleasant fire at the bistro in Three Pines, drinking a nice hot chocolate. Thank you again, Hope, for getting us off to an excellent start in our re-examination of A Fatal Grace, and joining in on our discussions. CC de Poitiers was electrocuted in the middle of a frozen lake, in front of the entire village, as she watched the annual curling tournament.After Gamache gathers his team in the old railway station, Beauvoir recaps the only way CC’s murder could have worked: “A: she had to be standing in water; B: she had to have taken off her gloves; C: she had to touch something electrified; and D: she had to be wearing metal on the bottom of her boots. He'd see people smiling at each other as they got their cappuccinos at the café, or their fresh flowers or their baguettes.

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By the time I got to that meeting, I couldn’t stop talking about how amazing Louise was, except perhaps to ignore everyone else and keep reading more of the story. A 12-year old overweight girl is described on multiple occasion in the most jarring, mean-spirited way - not by other characters, but the author.

I’m wondering if you mean that Yvette has somehow become the repository for the fears of her family. And while the book talked a lot about light Saul found it interesting and ironic that it had actually been released on the winter solstice. No goddamned enlightenment,' she'd said to Saul in her Montreal office the day a batch of rejection letters arrived, ripping them into pieces and dropping them on the floor for the hired help to clean up. We are in the midst of a "polar vortex" currently so I could relate to the author's description of the brutal winter weather. Then Inspector Gamache came on the scene, late in my judgment, but once he made his appearance, the story took off, with an accelerating pace that lasted all the way through.

The villain of the book is CC de Poitiers, who is a textbook destructive narcissist; she is delusional about her own abilities and importance, treats other people as disposable props in her glorious narrative, and viciously attacks anyone who fails to treat her with the proper breathless worship. Something I think is very interesting is that Gamache did something in the past that ended any upward movement of his career. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté and his wife, Reine-Marie, make their first appearance in the book on the day after Christmas, when they have a tradition of reviewing unsolved cases. CC, who had a "spiritual guidance" business based on eliminating emotion, was hated by seemingly everyone, including her husband, lover, and daughter.