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 neighbour 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.
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[As Clara Morrow approached, she wondered if he'd repeat the same small gesture he'd done every morning]***
(@MinotaurBooks, 26 August 2014, 388 pages, paperback, #popsugarreadingchallenge 2020, a book with an upside down image on the cover, borrowed from @GlasgowLib)
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I'd never heard of the author or Inspector Gamache before. I chose this book purely because I like the front cover and it fit nicely with the prompt for the reading challenge. I enjoyed The Long Way Home and will read more books in the series. This is more of a mystery than anything else. I love a good mystery. I liked Three Pines where the book is set, it felt like a real place to me and one I want to get to know better. This is quite a slow paced book and it takes a good while for all of the pieces to be revealed as Gamache's search for the missing Peter leads them to Quebec and into the heart of a strange cult. Disturbing questions mount about just how desperate Peter is to recover his muse. The book is very slow at times and drags in the middle but there is some good stuff here and I wanted to know what the hell was going on so I stuck with it. There are a lot of art references which got dull after a while. There is some good stuff here and it got me interested in other book by the author which can only be a good thing.
