Louise Penny Rights the Ship in A World of Curiosities

 

 

A WORLD OF CURIOSITIES (2022)

By Louise Penny

Minotaur/St. Martin’s, 380 pages.

★★★★

 

 

 

Louise Penny’s previous two Armand Gamache mysteries were mildly disappointing, which makes A World of Curiosities a redemptive work. The title references how people in earlier times who traveled very little learned about the world beyond their immediate area. One way was to commission artists to paint canvases crammed with exotica collected or described by travelers. One such work, The Paston Treasure, was rendered by an unknown Dutch artist for a 17^th century British aristocratic family. It plays a major role in A World of Curiosities. 

 

The Paston Treaure

 

 

Penny also builds a narrative involving two infamous events from the 20^th century, two Québec City bridge collapses (1907, 1916) that killed 88 people and the 1989 Montréal Massacre, which saw a male gunmen storm the École Polytechnique, order male students to leave, and systematically shot female students, killing 14 and wounding 13.* In the novel, Armand Gamache is a low-level cop on the team that responds to the Polytechnique slaughter. Still another historical event involves Anne Lamarche (a real person) accused of witchcraft in the 17^th century. Penny turns her into a legend as the founder of Gamache’s village of Three Pines.   

 

The book opens with a chase before segueing to how Gamache rescued his future son-in-law Jean-Guy Beauvoir from the basement of the Sûreté du Québec and brought the surly and disrespectful young man onto his team. Penny fans know that Gamache has a habit of taking on hard-luck cases, but is he always right?

 

The bulk of the story involves Myrna Landers’ niece, Harriet, who is about to graduate from the Polytechnique, and an old Gamache case involving the murder of a prostitute and the discovery that she had pimped her own children, Fiona and Sam Arsenault. Gamache aided Fiona later in life, but there’s something about Sam that makes him smell a sociopath. Trouble begins when Myrna contemplates selling her bookstore and moving away because the shop’s living quarters are too small for her, partner Billy Williams, and Harriet. Imagine everyone’s surprise when a view from the church steeple suggests there is a hidden room below the roof line. They are even more surprised when the wall is breached and the room is filled with things placed there a long time ago, including a copy of The Paston Treasure.

 

It's more sinister than that; there is strange writing on the painting and figures appear to be victims of serial killer John Fleming. (Penny fans will recognize Fleming as her equivalent to Conan Doyle’s brilliant-but-psychopathic Professor Moriarty.) How is that possible if the room has been sealed for over a century and Fleming is in maximum security prison? Marie-Reine Gamache is dispatched to England to examine the original Treasure for possible clues while Gamache and his team simultaneously investigate the local mystery and a recent murder. The agnostic Gamache is so perplexed that he seeks solace from the new local minister, the Rev. Robert Mongeau. All of the regular Three Pines crew make appearances–Clara, Gabri, Olivier, Ruth, and Rosa the duck–but this book largely focuses on the extended Gamache family and on Myrna. There are also appearances from previous Gamache rescue projects and proteges such as Amelia Choquet and Isabelle Lacoste.

 

Lots of things factor into the plot beside the painting: self-doubt, an old letter delivered to Billy intended for his ancestors, a book of magic, running, adolescent lust, a rising stack of bodies, and a resolution that is clock-beating on several levels. Much of the novel will make your heart pound and others will make your skin crawl. Some Penny fans have complained that recent books are too dark. That depends, I suppose, whether you want a soap opera or a murder mystery. After all, homicide tales require that someone has to meet with an unpleasant end.

 

A more legitimate quibble is that Penny is recycling. She repeats phrases (over-) used in previous books like references to Gamache’s “kind” eyes and shopworn jokes about Rosa the duck and Gamache’s ugly rescue dog. How many times now have we heard the four statements Gamache thinks every investigator should use: I’m sorry. I was wrong. I don’t know. I need help. This is Penny’s 18^th Armand Gamache mystery, so there is no need for redundancy; new readers who don’t go back to square one will be lost anyhow. Still, A World of Curiosities is cause for hope that Penny has righted the ship.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

* Unlike unspeakable acts in the United States such as Sandy Hook and Uvalde, Canada responded with strict gun control laws instead of BS pop psychology.