The Long Way Home

June 2, 2014
In Edgar-finalist Penny’s perceptive, perfectly paced 10th mystery featuring Chief Insp. Armand Gamache of the Quebec Sûreté (after 2013’s How the Light Gets In), Three Pines resident Peter Morrow has pledged to show up for a dinner with his wife, Clara, exactly one year after their separation. When Peter fails to materialize on the appointed day, Clara fears that he has either found a new woman—or died. Clara turns to Gamache for help in locating Peter, who appears to have adopted a new approach to painting during his time away from her. Over the course of the intriguing search, Penny offers real insight into the evolution of artistic style as well as the envy that artists feel about each other’s success. At times, the prose is remarkably fresh, filled with illuminating and delightful turns of phrase (e.g., Clara notices “her own ego, showing some ankle”), though readers should also be prepared for the breathless sentence fragments that litter virtually every chapter. Agent: Teresa Chris, Teresa Chris Literary Agency.

October 27, 2014
Officially retired, former chief of homicide Armand Gamache is at his beloved Quebec village of Three Pines, healing in mind and body after his ordeal in 2013’s How the Light Gets In, when a neighbor, celebrated artist Clara Morrow, asks him to find her estranged husband. Peter Morrow, also an artist, had departed Three Pines the previous year, promising to return on a specific day to discuss the status of their marriage. He didn’t make it and Clara is concerned. So is Gamache, who, as Penny has it, sees the shadow of murder even on sunny days. Thus begins a long, long journey during which Gamache, his loyal former assistant and now son-in-law, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, Clara, and some of the other delightfully eccentric villagers have an assortment of adventures. Cosham, who has been this series’ narrator for a while, has a comforting, avuncular British accent. To this he smoothly blends in a French influence that becomes more apparent in his pronunciation of Canadian names, places, and Quebecois dialogue. Cosham voices Gamache with a wary, almost fearful caution as he approaches the new case, but as the search for the missing painter goes from Toronto to Paris to a desolate spot on the St. Lawrence River, his voice grows stronger as his energy level rises. Jean-Guy, too, sounds more assertive and alive. Cosham’s vocal interpretations are mainly subtle—Clara, for example, doesn’t sound very different from Gamache’s wife, Raine-Marie—but his version of the village’s eccentric old poet, Ruth, has a distinctive sharpness not unlike that of the latter day Katharine Hepburn. A Minotaur hardcover.

August 1, 2014
Armand Gamache, former chief inspector of homicide for the Surete du Quebec, is settling into retirement in the idyllic village of Three Pines-but Gamache understands better than most that danger never strays far from home. With the help of friends and chocolate croissants and the protection of the village's massive pines, Gamache is healing. His hands don't shake as they used to; you might just mistake him and his wife, Reine-Marie, for an ordinary middle-age couple oblivious to the world's horrors. But Gamache still grapples with a "sin-sick soul"-he can't forget what lurks just beyond his shelter of trees. It's his good friend Clara Morrow who breaks his fragile state of peace when she asks for help: Peter, Clara's husband, is missing. After a year of separation, Peter was scheduled to return home; Clara needs to know why he didn't. This means going out there, where the truth awaits-but are Clara and Gamache ready for the darkness they might encounter? The usual cast of characters is here: observant bookseller Myrna; Gamache's second in command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir; even the bitter old poet, Ruth, is willing to lend a hand to find Peter, an artist who's lost his way. The search takes them across Quebec to the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, toward another sin-sick soul, one fighting to claw his way out of jealousy's grasp. Penny develops the story behind Peter's disappearance at a slow, masterful pace, revealing each layer of the mystery alongside an introspective glance at Gamache and his comrades, who can all sympathize with Peter's search for purpose. The emotional depth accessed here is both a wonder and a joy to uncover; if only the different legs of Peter's physical journey were connected as thoughtfully as his emotional one. Gamache's 10th outing (How the Light Gets In, 2013, etc.) culminates in one breathless encounter, and readers may feel they weren't prepared for this story to end. The residents of Three Pines will be back, no doubt, as they'll have new wounds to mend.

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Starred review from July 1, 2014

Penny's tenth book in her award-winning "Inspector Gamache" series (after How the Light Gets In) is another excellent character-driven mystery set in the village of Three Pines. After the explosive events in the previous book, Gamache and his wife have retired to Three Pines for peace and recuperation. But Gamache feels obligated to leave his refuge as one of his best friends, Clara Morrow, requires his expertise when her husband Peter goes missing. After Clara became a more famous artist than her spouse, Peter left to find himself, promising to be back in a year. But he has not returned. Retracing Peter's journey, Gamache, hoping to find his friend, instead encounters murder and madness. VERDICT As with all the author's other titles, Penny wraps her mystery around the history and personality of the people involved. By this point in the series, each inhabitant of Three Pines is a distinct individual, and the humor that lights the dark places of the investigation is firmly rooted in their long friendships, or, in some cases, frenemyships. The heartbreaking conclusion will leave series readers blinking back tears. Highly recommended.--Marlene Harris, Seattle P.L.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 1, 2014
Until now, Penny's challenge in her best-selling Armand Gamache series was to imagine new ways to take the chief inspector of the Sret' du Qu'bec from his Montreal home to the vividly evoked village of Three Pines, the author's setting of choice. Now, with Gamache retired to Three Pines, there is a new challenge: coming up with reasons to get her hero out of town. No challenge is too great for Penny, as skillful a plotter as she is a marvelous creator of landscape and character. Still grieving over the carnage that wreaked havoc with those he loves and with Three Pines itself (How the Light Gets In, 2013), Gamache reluctantly agrees to come to the aid of his friend, artist Clara Morrow, who is worried about her husband, fellow artist Peter, who has failed to return to Three Pines after their agreed-upon one-year separation. Gamache and his former assistant, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, follow Peter's trail to Europe and back to Toronto, where he visited his former art teacher, and on to the remote mouth of the St. Lawrence River. In search of artistic inspiration, Peter may have found something very different and much more lethal. As always, Penny dexterously combines suspense with psychological drama, overlaying the whole with an all-powerful sense of landscape as a conduit to meaning. The wilds of the upper St. Lawrence, once called the land God gave to Cain, combine echoes of mysticism with portents of evil, permeating the air with the same violent forces that roil within the characters. Another gem from the endlessly astonishing Penny. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Penny appears to have reserved a lifetime seat atop best-seller lists everywhere, and, with the appearance of her latest, she will take her place once again.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)