Disordered Daggers : How the Light Gets In by Louise Penny (2013)

The ninth book in Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series is perhaps not the best place to start, given that part of the storyline is dealing with the fallout of a traumatic breach of trust between Gamache and his deputy, Beauvoir. This breach - and the power games being played by Gamache’sinister boss Francoeur –would probably have resonated more deeply with me if I had been familiar with the characters. By the end of the novel truly significant events for the book series have happened, and I expect I would have cared more about them had I been reading the series from the start.

Despite this, I found Gamache’s central investigation – the murder of Constance Ouellet, the last surviving sibling of a famous family of Quebec quintuplets (sorry for the alliteration) a diverting case. I particularly enjoyed the backstory of how the Quints were used by everybody – Church, State, the family’s doctor – for self aggrandisement seventy years before.

This is also the first setting in a Daggers shortlisted novel that I might want to visit – the off-the-map village of Three Pines, with its bistro, cabins that smell of sandalwood, new and second hand bookstore, and resident eccentric poet laureate with her pet duck, the sort of locale that one might expect Jessica Fletcher to visit.

Overall though I prefer my crime slightly less cosy (or cozy, to use the genre label).