A Rule Against Murder

by Louise Penny

Minotaur Books     2008

322 pages      Mystery

Books in Series

If you haven’t fallen in love with Armand Gamache by the time you get to book 4 in the series by Louise Penny, you are a heartless fool.

As A Rule Against Murder (The Murder Stone in Canada) opens, Armand and his wife Reine Marie are on an anniversary weekend trip to Manoir Bellechasse, a lovely resort near Three Pines, and not far from Quebec City. The other guests at the lodge are the Finney family, also known as the Morrow family—a group of not-very-nice Anglos—at the lodge to have a memorial service for their long-departed father, Charles Morrow.

The Finney-Morrow clan are frankly not very nice, and while it takes almost 100 pages for a murder to be committed, the reader is convinced by that time that any one of the family members is rotten enough to die. Family members despise each other, and other than the child, Bean, any one of them can go! Penny says of the family: “The Morrows could be counted on to choose the right fork and the wrong word.” And then, the murder occurs. The statue created to commemorate the life of Charles Morrow crashes on one of the family members, and Inspector Gamache cannot figure out how a statue that heavy could fall off its marble pedestal. It is a gruesome murder, and the team of Sûreté inspectors arrive to interview all the guests and assess the situation. The mystery and its solution are very delightfully, and intricately developed, and I didn’t figure out the perpetrator any quicker than Gamache did.

My favorite scene in the book describes the only fun moment any of the Morrows had in their entire visit to Manoir Bellechasse. It involves little Bean throwing sticky cookies up on the ceiling of the lodge dining room. I laughed aloud knowing that finally Bean was having some fun.

The very best part of A Rule Against Murder is the way in which the character of Armand Gamache is developed. He is a remarkable man—we already knew that—but in this iteration of the series, we find that he is a loving husband and father as well as an insightful and feeling detective. In a recent interview, Louise Penny describes how she created the character. Watch it and you will see why everyone falls in love with Inspector Gamache. Some of the Sûreté controversy that surrounded Gamache in previous books has been settled by A Rule Against Murder, much to the relief of the readers. It was a bit tedious in The Cruelest Month.

Everyone that I have introduced to the Chief Inspector Gamache series has loved it. I am moving on to The Beautiful Mystery because it takes place at an Abbey that we are going to visit on our trip to Quebec over the next few days. The greatest strength of the series is the character development and the marvelous settings. I enjoyed every book thus far and look forward to meeting Louise Penny on Saturday at the bookstore in Knowlton, Quebec.