A Web of Intrigue: Louise Penny Keeps Readers Hooked

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I always love reading a new book in Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series. In book 18, A World of Curiosities, Penny once again weaves a masterful tale that entangles readers in a web of intricate plotlines.

This time, we see threads converging from various sources and experiences in Gamache’s past, reaching back to his initial encounter with Jean-Guy Beauvoir and even further beyond the creation of the beloved Three Pines community.

What do a 16th-century painting and a lost-and-now-found grimoire have to do with the death of a woman ruled as suicide and the two children Gamache tried to help ten years earlier? And where is it all leading to? (I can’t tell you for sure, as it is all still coming into focus at this point in the story!)

With each turn of the page, readers are transported not only into a thrilling murder investigation but also into the intricate layers of Gamache’s personal history, the diverse characters of Three Pines, the stories and poems that Gamache loves, and a thoughtful consideration of misogyny and how it has affected Canadian lives in the past and still does in the present.

She lived, it seemed, at the place where the river Styx narrowed.