Book Report: A Trick of the Light

1. Louise Penny, A Trick of the Light (2011) (1/2/22)

After finishing my final—66th—book of 2021, I decided I deserved something undemanding: nothing like a good mystery. A Trick of the Light is the seventh in Penny's Inspector Gamache series, set in the tiny Québec village of Three Pines and involving all of her regular characters, plus a few others both old and new. This story invokes the art world: galleries, dealers, art openings, of course artists—and critics as well, including the one found dead in a flower bed the morning after a party celebrating artist Clara Morrow's grand success at Montréal's Musée d'Art Contemporain. Although the victim's days of critiquing were well behind her, she had hurt, even destroyed the careers of enough people in the past that Gamache's work is cut out for him.

Also entering the story are Alcoholics Anonymous, Humpty Dumpty and the possibility of a great fall, marriages in trouble, frogs in a frying pan, vulnerability and forgiveness, and whether a person can really change. Inspector Jean Guy Beauvoir has thoughts on that last question:

"Listen, people don't change. You think the trout in the [Rivière] Bella Bella are there because they love Three Pines? But maybe next year they'll go somewhere else?" Beauvoir jerked his head toward the river.
     Gamache looked at his Inspector. "What do you think?"
     "I think the trout have no choice. They return because they're trout. That's what trout do. Life is that simple. Ducks return to the same place every year. Geese do it. Salmon and butterflies and deer. Jeez, deer are such creatures of habit they wear a trail through the woods and never deviate. That's why so many are shot, as we know. They never change. People are the same. We are what we are. We are who we are."
     "We don't change?" Gamache took a piece of fresh asparagus.
     "Exactly. You taught me that people, that cases, are basically very simple. We're the ones who complicate it."

The possibility of grace—and of fundamental change—is a theme of this book, whether it's through sobriety and making amends, through patience and faith, through forgiveness of self or other. In the end, although I wasn't necessarily expecting the killer to be who they were, I also wasn't especially surprised. It made sense enough. The twist I did like, though, involved an AA sponsor and his sponsee: a reversal of expectations. Our stories, the details of our lives, can take us down unexpected paths. The book ends on a note of hope.