Glass Houses by Louise Penny. A mystery! In which a mysterious figure shows up in Inspector Gamache’s home town, someone is murdered, a sting is set up, and there is a trial…Except we start at the trial and jump all around back and forth.
Who recommended this? My friend Marilyn, who is also one of my woodturning mentors. She is a fantastic artist and a great teacher. Earlier in the day before reading this she helped me finish up a bowl, and made most of an idea I had come to life (she made sure I helped, but it was a 90/10 split.) Insert picture. To be fair, Marilyn recommended this series; I chose the book for being the earliest in the series at the used book store.
How did I feel about this book?
It was slow. Really slow. My mom walked in when I was reading and assured me that the action usually picks up by the end—and it did—but at over 350 pages, 20 of action is not enough.
I love jumping around a timeline. Somehow, in this book, the plot seemed to get lost. It’s a murder case, but actually it’s a drug case! We’re in this character’s head! Now we’re in this character’s head! To be fair, this book was written while the author’s husband was dying—then after his death, so a lot of it was probably therapy to her.
Let me make it clear that the writing itself was fine. Lovely place descriptions, nice dialogue, no painful dialects. I understand why Louise Penny is a best seller. However.
The character list was so long. Half of them I didn’t care about, and the two or three that were interesting had little time for anything interesting to happen because they were pushed out of the way to make room for more characters to come on stage. This caused a glut of exposition and post action explaining of motivations and such, which is like making someone run the last half of a mile of a marathon in the mud.
The plot had a lot of obvious beats with something of a twist ending, except the twist was about characters that were underdeveloped and kind of boring. The red herring characters had such a feeble excuse for their behavior that the author even writes into the story that sometimes revenge takes on a life of its own. Really? That storyline sort of fizzles at the end and we get no explanation for a bunch of weird character actions.
Perhaps the biggest issue the narrative holds is trying to do too much in one book. It is par for the course to have a small mystery that leads to solving a bigger one, but as a reader I want to know the motivations and story of the the people creating the chaos. Instead, Penny delves deeply into the mentality of the detective as he “answers to a higher court”, taking up far too much page time with his introspection on barely relatable emotional tangents rather than offering us glimpses of the criminals and the destruction they are creating on a larger scale.
In the end I set the book down with relief. I have read a couple other Louise Penny books in the past and enjoyed them well enough—though I can’t remember the plots—so I am going to blame myself for grabbing a super slow one. Which brings me to…
Who would I recommend this book to?
Prolific mystery readers who like a slow burn…well not this book, but this series. I like my narratives a lot snappier, but this book was a lot better than MANY mysteries I have picked up and then put down again thirty pages later.
Would I have seen the twist coming had I still been paying attention? Maybe, but usually I can pick out the perp the first time they are introduced and Penny had me lazily guessing until she unveiled the baddie at the climax.
Also, people over 70. Book pacing changed in the ’90s and this series has that vintage pacing that many boomers would probably get a kick out of.
This has a spice level of 1 and violence level of 2. There is a gun battle but generally the descriptions are about the reaction of people witnessing it rather than the victims.
Writing Prompt: Starting at the 3/4 mark! Action generally starts just before, during, or just after the action. Try a Louise Penny and start no where near the action on one of these scenarios:
-A bakery robbery
-A duck accidentally gets drunk
-A guy named Yvon makes an omelette
Mamasquatch the Writer 
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