How the Light Gets In by Louise Penny (2013)

I had to read this soon after the last one, as I was so distraught on how things were left, that Jean-Guy Beauvoir turned away from Inspector Gamache and even hated him. But Whew! things were resolved in this book.

The murder to be solved in this book is of Myrna's friend Constance, who is supposed to spend Christmas in Three Pines, but is found dead in Montreal. Myrna calls on Gamache to find why she didn't shop up. He learns she is one of the quints - quintuplets that were born 80 or so years ago and were quite famous. They had disappeared from the spotlight after their late teens, had changed their last names, and lived isolated lives. Throughout the other major things happening in the book, Gamache keeps tracing their lives to figure out who killed Constance. It also gives him an excuse to be traveling back to Three Pines.

But the major part of the book has been brewing for a long time. I would have to go back to the first book to see if their were any traces of it there, but there were always some problems between the administrators and Gamache. Then at some point it came out that he had gotten Pierre Arnot(sp?), head of the Surete du Quebec, arrested for corruption. The biggest event we got to read about a few books ago, was when Gamache and his team stopped the blowing up of a dam, with loss of lives on his team and Gamache and Beauvoir getting shot and taking a long time to recover. That too was connected with corruption at high levels. In this book we find that all of Gamache's trusted homicide investigators have been transferred out of his unit and replaced by young, disrespectful and incompetent men and it is only a matter of time that he is forced to resign. He only has Isabelle Lacoste to depend on. For this adventure he also pulls Ivette Nichole (sp?) out of the basement where he put her with her brilliant but warped mind, as she could not function as an inspector with him.

We are in familiar territory in Three Pines with the usual cast of characters, but even those are evolving, as Clara misses Peter, Ruth shows a softer side, and the house from the very first book becomes a home base for Gamache. I liked that the village made some of the bad guys feel uncomfortable, and accepted the new good guys with open hearts."How the light gets in" refers to things needing cracks, not being perfect, to have light come in. And lines from Ruth's poem get repeated a lot - What has hurt you so... (shoot, got to look them up again.)

At the end of the recorded book there was a conversation between the author and Ralph Cosham, the narrator of the books, who met for the first time. I was surprised to find that he reads the books cold - he doesn't read them ahead of time, he just starts recording, so he is as surprised by the turn of events as we are. But he too commented on the comfort he has with Three Pines. I would want to live there, except that they keep having these murders.