The Long Way Home (Chief Inspector Gamache)

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, August 2014: In her previous novel, the international bestseller How The Light Gets In, Louise Penny left her embattled homicide inspector, Armand Gamache, in the idyllic village of Three Pines, on the edge of a new phase of life: retirement. At the start of The Long Way Home, the tenth in Penny’s wildly popular Inspector Gamache series (you can buy “Vive Gamache” t-shirts and mugs from Penny’s website), Gamache and his wife are finally at peace, mixing among the quirky, testy inhabitants of Three Pines. But recovery would make for a dull book, so trouble soon finds Gamache when his neighbor Clara seeks help finding her missing husband, who left town in a funk over Clara’s success as an artist. In dragging Gamache from his reverie, Clara realizes she’s awakened something in the ex-chief. There’s a mythic heft to the story--man can’t escape the past, or evil, or death. Though the descent into darkness, and the search for a “sin-sick soul,” at times felt overly ominous, I liked Penny’s exploration of art, jealousy, and the lengths to which people will go to create something that matters. But, as with the entire series, it’s Penny’s chiseled characters that make this novel such a treat. Three Pines is a cozy, friendly place, but even amid the picturesque pines of southern Quebec, sin and sick souls are always lurking. --Neal Thompson