The
Murder Stone (US title: A Rule Against Murder)
An
Armand Gamache Mystery
Louise
Penny
St.
Martin's Minotaur (Hardcover)
ISBN-10: 0-312-37702-9 (0312377029)
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-37702-1 (9780312377021)
Publication Date: January 2009
List Price: $24.95
Synopsis (from
the publisher): It is the height of summer, and Armand and Reine-Marie
Gamache are celebrating their wedding anniversary at Manoir
Bellechasse, an isolated, luxurious inn not far from the village of
Three Pines. But they’re not alone. The Finney
family—rich, cultured, and respectable—has also
arrived for a celebration of their own.
The beautiful Manoir Bellechasse might be surrounded by nature, but
there is something unnatural looming. As the heat rises and the
humidity closes in, some surprising guests turn up at the family
reunion, and a terrible summer storm leaves behind a dead body. It is
up to Chief Inspector Gamache to unearth secrets long buried and
hatreds hidden behind polite smiles. The chase takes him to Three
Pines, into the dark corners of his own life, and finally to a
harrowing climax.
Review:
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surete du Quebec has solved his
previous cases in the fall, winter and spring in the idyllic Three
Pines village of Quebec’s Eastern Townships. But now it is a
scorching summer and he is on vacation at the nearby historic Manoir
Bellechasse to celebrate Canada Day, July 1, and his thirty-fifth
anniversary with his beloved Reine-Marie. Murder, however, as everyone
knows, never vacations, so he has no sooner settled into the inn and
its amenities than he is called upon to solve the most puzzling
“How” of all the murder cases in his career as a
several ton statue topples from its marble pedestal to crush its
bloodied, mud-covered victim, but leaves the pedestal unblemished.
In straying just beyond the bounds of Three Pines, Penny has maintained
the picturesque setting of rural Quebec, but introduced a whole new set
of characters in the wealthy Finney family led by its acerbic-tongued
matriarch, Irene, and her second husband Bert Finney who may or may not
have married her for her money or for a couple of secrets they share.
Her daughter, Mariana Morrow, is cruelly nicknamed by her siblings as
“Magilla the Gorilla” for her attachment as a child
to the cartoon show of the same name. Mariana is a single mom to her
uniquely strange10-year-old child, Bean, of undisclosed sex, a secret
she and the child refuse to share with others. Irene’s
pretentious and cruel son, Thomas Morrow, has come from Toronto with
his snobbish wife, Sandra. Irene’s estranged daughter, Julia
Martin, of Vancouver, has recently divorced from her jailed embezzler
husband and claims to know her father’s secret. Peter and
Clara Morrow, the artists and year-round residents of Three Pines and
by now fast friends of the Gamaches have reluctantly joined the
gathering but can’t wait to get home for the annual Canada
Day celebrations and the clogging event that Reine-Marie is just as
reluctantly dreading. A more distrustful, despicable and dislikeable
family it would be hard to find. Their initial view of the Gamaches
before Peter and Clara arrive is as “the shopkeeper and his
cleaning woman wife.”
But their view rapidly changes when a family member is found impaled
into the earth by the statue of Irene’s first husband,
Charles Morrow, for whom the family have reunited to provide a
reluctant tribute, lest mother disinherit them. Gamache quickly takes
charge, bringing his team of “alpha dog” Inspector
Jean Guy Beauvoir and Agent Isabelle Lacoste, “the hunter of
their team,’ to the lodge to begin their procedures of
analysis, interviews, debate and meditation to discover who among the
family or the staff at the inn might have committed the crime.
Everybody is more or less of a suspect – even
Gamache’s friends peter and Clara and the enigmatic child
clutching his book of mythology, firing half-eaten marshmallow cookies
to stick on the dining-room ceiling or listening to his chock-a-block
bedroom of clocks ticking, ticking, ticking. Credible motivations
abound from the past as well as the present. But it is the means of the
murder that challenges the Gamache team beyond anything they have faced
previously. The solution, however, like the Devil who did the deed, is
found in the details of “Such a small thing. Imagine that
giving away a murder,” and in the words of a poem that speak
prophetically of slipping “the surly bonds of
earth” as Gamache battles his fear of heights during a fierce
summer storm to rescue another potential victim and shackle a murderer.
As always, Penny is meticulous in finding memorable descriptions. Chef
Veronique, for example, “was huge and beefy, her face like a
pumpkin and her voice like a root vegetable. And she had knives. Lots
of them. And cleavers and cast-iron pans.” Another character
stands with “his hand to his brow to block out the sun, as
though in a permanent salute.” And a third, “went
through life with his shields raised, repulsing attack by food or
beverage, or people.” Little wonder shields are raised when
their father, Charles, dispensed advice to them such as,
“Never use the first stall in a washroom.” Penny
uses words to depict settings like a landscape painter uses his brushes
and colours. Dialogue flows without a glitch and there’s
humour, too, in Gamache referring to a pet duck as a Clouseau-like
“minkey” or Beauvoir decrying that, “here
in the middle of nowhere ... it was like trying to conduct a modern
murder investigation in Fred Flintstone’s cave.” On
the serious side there is the murder in a “greedy and even
cruel” family wherein the victim admittedly was
“the cruellest, the greediest of us all.” There is
a gripping, underlying story as well about Gamache’s father,
Honore, a conscientious objector during the War, and now Mrs. Finney
firing the epithet, “Coward,” at Gamache like
bullets from a machine gun even as he and his own son, Daniel, tussle
over the naming of a new baby after the old man, while Reine-Marie
patiently interacts.
Truly, another flawless performance, The
Murder Stone
has been nominated for Best Novel for 2009 for the Arthur Ellis Awards.
Special thanks to M. Wayne Cunningham (mw_cunningham@telus.net) for contributing his review of The Murder Stone (US title: A Rule Against Murder).
Review Copyright © 2009 — M. Wayne Cunningham — All Rights Reserved — Reprinted with Permission
Have you read The Murder Stone (US title: A Rule Against Murder)? How would you rate it?
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St. Martin's Minotaur (Hardcover), July 2006
ISBN-10: 0-312-35255-7 (0312352557)
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-35255-4 (9780312352554)
A
Fatal
Grace
St. Martin's Minotaur (Hardcover), May 2007
ISBN-10: 0-312-35256-5 (0312352565)
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-35256-1 (9780312352561)
The
Cruelest Month
St. Martin's Minotaur (Hardcover), March 2008
ISBN-10: 0-312-35257-3 (0312352573)
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-35257-8 (9780312352578)
A Rule Against Murder
St. Martin's Minotaur (Hardcover), January 2009
ISBN-10: 0-312-37702-9 (0312377029)
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-37702-1 (9780312377021)
Omnimystery
keywords for The Murder Stone (US
title: A Rule Against Murder)
...
Location(s) referenced: Quebec, Canada.
