A Better Man by Louise Penny (Mystery)

Writing: 3/5 Plot: 4/5 Characters: 4/5
The latest installment of the beloved Inspector Gamache series is a bit disappointing, to be honest. I loved every one of her books until Glass Houses which I thought was terrible. After that came Kingdom of the Blind which was gratifyingly back to Penny’s typical level of excellence. Unfortunately, A Better Man appears to be a regression. It’s a decent story — Gamache and crew try to find a missing, frequently abused, woman and, eventually, identify her murderer. In the background is the threat of an every one-hundred-years flood, Gamache’s demotion to Head of Homicide after a nine month suspension, and the potential clash between Gamache and Beauvoir for the three overlapping weeks where they both wear the same title. Unfortunately, the book is poorly written, repetitive, and trite.

The book is overly emotional — many pages are devoted to Gamache and Beauvoir imagining their own feelings had it been their daughter who had been abused and eventually murdered. And while I love Gamache’s calm, steady, and kind manner, I swear that word kindness was presented multiple times on each page. It was as though Penny didn’t trust her readers to get the message and felt she had to repeat it over and over again. Or maybe she just didn’t have enough plot to fill the pages.

It was not a hard book to read — her writing style is clean and the plot twists were interesting. There were a few scenes in Three Pines which I always enjoy, but even there I think her characters have run their course — there is nothing new, and watching all of the hand wringing has become boring.

She also included a fairly shallow portrayal of a woman named Dominica Oddly — an all-powerful online art critic who, using her extremely popular online presence, could build or destroy artists with a single post. Oddly’s description was “wild black woman in dreadlocks and combat boots,” but she was given no further depth. This was combined with some plot around the dangers of social media with two tweet storms causing real pain for two of the characters. I feel like Penny is trying to update her fictional world but doesn’t have enough real understanding of it herself to give the characters the kind of depth she has been so successful with.