Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Review: "The Nature of the Beast," Louise Penny

Mystery review of The Nature of the Beast by Louise Penny

By Paul Carrier

Armand Gamache, who took early retirement from his job as the top homicide cop in the Sûreté du Québec (the provincial police force), is living quietly with his wife Reine-Marie in the fictional Québec village of Three Pines when Louise Penny’s 11th Chief Inspector Gamache novel opens.

But Gamache still has the keen instincts that made him one of the most celebrated criminal investigators in Canada. So when nine-year-old Laurent Lepage, a local boy with an overly vivid imagination and a penchant for telling tall tales, is found dead after apparently being thrown from his bike, Gamache suspects foul play.

Reopening the case, police discover that Lepage was murdered, and then moved to the “accident” scene, because he discovered a massive missile launcher hidden in the woods outside Three Pines. Lepage had told Gamache and others about the outsize weapon before he died, but at the time, Gamache dismissed it as one of the child’s fanciful, never-ending stories about aliens and kidnappings and zombies.

This time, though, the boy who always cried wolf had seen the real thing, in the guise of a mysterious piece of military-style hardware whose metal base is emblazoned with an etching of a woman — the Whore of Babylon from the biblical Book of Revelation. She holds the reins to a winged, seven-headed monster decorated with a Hebrew inscription from Psalm 137 that reads: “By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept.”

Now the Sûreté, with Gamache’s welcome assistance, must try to determine who built the aged “supergun” in the forest and why the unused, long-abandoned weapon led to the murder of a child.

Adding to the mystery, odd coincidences begin to crop up linking the “gun” and its supposed creator, physicist Gerald Bull, to a play written by John Fleming, a convicted serial killer.

Fleming’s play is entitled I Sat Down and Wept — similar wording to that etched on the launcher. Fleming committed his first murder in 1990, the same year Bull was gunned down in Europe. And shortly after Lepage’s death, the director of a nearby theater group who had decided to produce Fleming’s play is found murdered in the home she inherited from her late uncle, an associate of Bull.

As a longtime fan who has read all of the previous novels in this series, it strikes me that Gamache, retired, is not as compelling a character as Gamache on active duty. Still, the brilliant, bilingual detective remains the thoughtful and gentlemanly figure of old, regardless of his employment status.

Throughout this series, which began with Still Life in 2006, Penny has displayed an instantly recognizable style and a satisfying knack for building suspense. She plumbs the psychological depths of her characters, while juxtaposing the elements of light and darkness buried in the human psyche.

Penny’s skills as a writer are in evidence here, as they are throughout this series, but perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of The Nature of the Beast is its pacing. The close of virtually every chapter leaves the reader wondering what will happen next, making it almost impossible to put the book down.

And there are other joys as well. Recurring motifs include the idyllic village of Three Pines, which seems so picture-perfect (except when people are being knocked off); the colorful cast of local characters (there’s no forgetting irascible poet Ruth and her pet duck Rosa); and Penny’s hunger-inducing penchant for describing all manner of scrumptious edibles in loving detail. (The denizens of Three Pines seem to spend an awful lot of time chowing down at the village bistro.)

“I love food,” Penny said in a recent Time magazine interview. She said she wanted to make the novels “really sensuous, so that when you read the books it’s not just going into your brain, it’s going into your nose and your ears and you’re smelling the café au lait, and you’re tasting the ham and brie sandwich, you’re feeling the warmth of the fire after the cold outside.”