The Long Way Home

by Louise Penny (read by Ralph Cosham) c. 2014

Chief Inspector Gamache, Book 10

Library Loan

 

 

 

 

 

 

Length: 12 hrs and 4 mins

Unabridged Audiobook

Release date: 08-26-14

Language: English

Publisher: Macmillan Audio

Publisher's Summary

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.

The spirit of envy can destroy; it can never build.

Margaret Thatcher

I like the Three Pines/Inspector Gamache series. I'm not reading it in order and I'm not rushing my way through. Three Pines is the ideal hometown populated with the most diverse group of kind-hearted over-achievers you have ever met. It is a town of contradictions -- small enough that it isn't even on the map (Brigadoon) but large enough to support a bistro, a bakery and a used book store (I can't figure out how). Mostly, it is such an ironic backdrop for stories that are themselves so dark.

In general, I like her writing. I like the way, in a novel where her characters are actually speaking French, she spends a couple of pages describing a stone circle of hares and ends, very convincingly, having it confused with hair, which could only happen in English because in French they are very different words. I like her stories -- dark and deep but not graphically gory. I like the complicated plots and I like the way she slowly peels back the layers on the characters, even the recurring characters. I love the depth of Armande Gamache, his complicated life on the police force and now in retirement. I like the bold steps she has taken in the arc of this series, pushing readers out of their comfort zone as she chooses the road less taken.

However, this is not the best book in the series. The premise stretches the bounds of credulity and while I enjoyed the journey, the destination was disappointing.

Three stars