A World of Curiosities: A Chief Inspector Gamache Mystery, NOW A MAJOR TV SERIES CALLED THREE PINES

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Clearly A World of Curiosities is not cozy crime even if Three Pines does have the vibe of being a rural idyll. The issue of child abuse that features in the early chapters might be off-putting to some readers but it’s handled with sensitivity and minimal detail. It’s hard not to have favorite characters. One may be the brilliant and fascinating character of Amelia Choquet with her complex history. She is described by Myrna as—"If Ruth and a trash compactor had a child,…” Her use of three particular lines at the end of the book is incredibly powerful. it begins in the past, with recollections of the murder of a prostitute and drug addict whose two children were discovered to be victims of sexual abuse. The case has haunted Gamache and his second in command Jean Guy Beauvoir for many years. And how could the picture get into a room sealed over a century ago? There are a lot of mysteries to be solved here, and the presence of Fiona and Sam Arsenault make things even murkier. Actually I think Rosa was important to add some levity to the whole thing, otherwise it would have been so so heavy.

One is Harriet Landers, the niece of Myrna Landers, who owns the bookstore in Three Pines and is a close friend of the Gamaches. The other is Fiona Arsenault, whom they have helped in the years after her mother’s murder. The 2022 crime mystery book follows the investigation into a series of murders in Quebec, and briefly references the real life 1989 École Polytechnique massacre. Treasures, from the 1860s (the original can be viewed online.) On further observation, there are some startling changes noticed in the painting. A woman is wearing a digital watch, and a model plane is depicted. There are almost imperceptible codes embedded in the picture implying vengeance. How is this possible in a room sealed off for more than a century? I enjoyed seeing the darker sides of Gamache. No human is a saint, we're all sinners. And not in any religious sense, we are by nature petty, jealous and vengeful - it's just that we contain this in different measures and some have so many more virtuous traits that their darker streaks rarely show. But they are there. I love reading novels where a specific painting, either real or invented, features – especially when we’re given a detailed description of it. I suppose it’s part and parcel of my needing a sense of space in my fiction, whether an imaginary environment like Gormenghast or that of Piranesi’s carceri, or descriptions of real geography in fiction.A World of Curiosities is a fiction book written by Canadian author and former journalist Louise Penny. It is the 18th novel in a series of mystery novels featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. [1] It was published by Minotaur Books [2] as a sequel to Penny's 2021 book The Madness of Crowds. [3]

A copy of a painting, the original of which is in England: The Paston Treasure, (yes, it’s a real painting) at Norwich Castle Museum, depicts objects from the collections of a local landed family. The Pastons established one of the most extensive cabinets of rarities and curiosities in seventeenth-century England—it boasted no fewer than six hundred decorative art objects, including shell cups, crystal vessels, a pair of crocodiles, gemstones, musical instruments, and paintings. Some guy (not revealed until later) makes a copy of this painting and has contemporary images superimposed on some of the original objects and hides it in a sealed room in a house in Three Pines. It was a bleak day. The first of November. A wind blew in from the north, bringing with it the promise of rain. Perhaps sleet. Perhaps freezing rain. Even snow. In her 18th book in the Inspector Gamache series, A World of Curiosities, Louise Penny gives us a look into Armand and Jean-Guy's "origin stories." In 1989 a young Armand Gamache was present at the real-life incident of a man killing 14 woman engineering students at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique, propelling him into a career in homicide. Ten years later Gamache recruits an angry, undisciplined officer, Jean-Guy Beauvior to help solve a murder. Both of these events have reverberations in the current timeline and bearing upon 3 more murders.a b "The Paston Treasure, Microcosm of the Known World / East Anglia Art Fund". Eastangliaartfund.org.uk . Retrieved 28 February 2017. That had been years ago, but the rabbit habit hadn’t wholly taken. Most months Harriet remembered, but of course this month, when she needed it most, she’d forgotten. Though she knew it was probably because she had so much else on her mind. He didn’t have to guess her age, he actually knew exactly how old she was. Thirty-six. And he knew her name, though they hadn’t yet searched her body for ID, and no formal identification had been made. He heard a snort of derision behind him and ignored it, continuing to stare into the worried eyes of the dead woman at his feet.