"All of them? Even the children?" The fireplace sputtered and cackled and swallowed his gasp. "Slaughtered?"

Any time a book starts with that paragraph, you know it's going to be a fascinating, suspenseful ride. And The Brutal Telling is that, and more. It's an exploration of the human condition.

The Brutal Telling is the latest of Louise Penny's Inspector Gamache novels. Penny brings the reader back to Three Pines, a quiet, isolated village in the woods. Inspector Gamache has been called back to solve another murder, but it's going to take a lot of detective work and intuition to peel back the layers of lies covering the truth behind the shocking murder of an unknown hermit.

We know some of the lies from the beginning; Olivier, who finds the hermit's body lying on the floor of his own bistro, says he doesn't know the man, even though we know that he does. In a normal murder mystery, that would be enough for me to say without a doubt that he did it. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, Penny doesn't make things so easy on the reader. With the introduction of every new character, we see someone who may have been able to do it. Penny has woven subtext, red herring, and truth together into a plot as rich as any tapestry hanging on the wall, and even at the end of the book, I wondered if the police really arrested the right person; in spite of all the physical evidence, I really thought there was something missing, some way that the police could have been wrong.

The Brutal Telling isn't a typical murder mystery. All the traditional elements are there, of course, but there are elements that are present that seem to have nothing to do with the actual murder investigation, except peripherally. There is a sub-plot involving a talented artist and her husband, and her desire to have her works shown in a major gallery. It seemed to me at the time that the only reason this plot was there was to introduce an art expert or two to the book, which plays a somewhat important role in the investigation.

Article Author: Warren Kelly

Warren Kelly is a graduate student studying church history at Southern Seminary in Louisville, KY. His personal blog, View From the Pew, is a repository for his cultural criticism and theological/historical writings, and his weekly podcast features …

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