The setup for this book is very long and the main thing the author established was how cruel some characters were and how others were affected by cruelty.

So if you love mystery and rare, rich setting; if you long for unique characters and meaning deep as bones, then don't miss A FATAL GRACE. And how saintly Gamache is, even though I can’t see it, because Penny tells me, but does not show it. CC lived, Saul knew, in her own world, where she was perfect, where she could hide her feelings and hide her failings.In the midst of a killing Quebec winter, the inspector has to figure out how the woman could have been electrocuted while attending a curling match on a frozen lake.

In thinking about it, it occurred to me that, on the one hand, you have the world of Three Pines and, on the other, for example, the world of Matthew Scudder's New York City as imagined by Lawrence Block. Meanwhile, Gamache is astonished when Clara proudly shows him the Li Bien ornament Peter gave her for Christmas, which is exactly like the ball CC supposedly used as the basis for her garbled philosophy. He flipped through the other pages and slowly felt a smile come to his frozen face and move to his hardened heart. With his trademark compassion and courage, Gamache digs beneath the idyllic surface of village life to find the dangerous secrets long buried there. I also love the way Louise focuses on the power of words, from the literal handwriting on more than one wall, to the hidden meanings of names like Mother, Elle, and Crie (what kind of parents would name a child that?So it should come as no surprise that when CC is electrocuted in the middle of a frozen lake, in front of the entire village, as she watched the annual curling tournament no one is grieving too much or that her shocking death was no accident. I know I will and I’ll not be waiting until I go to an out of town library until I read the next installment. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Gamache is furious to see her, and knows that his enemies at Headquarters are still working against him.I wanted to learn who killed her but unlike Chief Inspector Gamache could not summon up any great desire for her killer to be brought to justice. Chapters 1-21: The first lines of A Fatal Grace foretell the death of the nastiest woman in Three Pines: “Had CC de Poitiers known she was going to be murdered she might have bought her husband, Richard, a Christmas gift…. This slow reveal, sandwiched between the current cases, keeps me wanting to learn more, yet take a moment to see the protagonist develop before my eyes. The dear old thing had hidden depths, courtesy of an author whose deceptively simple style masks the complex patterns of a well-devised plot. Second in the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series, in which he's back in little Three Pines, Quebec, following the murder of a despicable woman who's recently moved to town for reasons unclear to all.