A Great Reckoning

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A Chief Inspector Gamache Mystery Book 12, by Louise Penny, 2016, Audiobook narrated by Robert Bathurst, released in 2016 Macmillan Audio 3.0 stars

Gamache has come out retirement and has taken over leadership of the Sûreté academy, hoping to weed out further corruption. He makes some very questionable decisions, but he is confronted with a murder of one of the professors that he had decided to keep on rather than fire. The mystery hinges on what was going on at the academy and the involvement of three students.

The book, as other Penny books in the Three Pines series, starts slow (and continues to be slow throughout). The murder is eventually solved and there are no major twists in the plot of this one. The real enjoyment from reading her novels is to be able to follow the development and career of Gamach as well as of his friends and family.

The Nature of the Beast

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A Chief Inspector Gamache Mystery Book 11, by Louise Penny, 2015, Audiobook narrated by Robert Bathurst, released in 2015, Macmillan Audio 3.0 stars

A young boy who has a penchant for fantasy comes into the Bistro in Three Pines and announces that he has found a big gun with a horrible image on it in the woods. He tries to get retired Inspector Gamache to come with him to see it. Gamache doesn’t believe him and takes him home instead. The next day the boy is found dead in a ravine.

This book is interesting as it incorporates world events, particularly by referencing Saddam Hussein and other world arms dealers. The ending, however, is a bit of a letdown as I have found with other Louise Penny books. She usually picks up the things she didn’t resolve in subsequent books. I will plow ahead to see if that’s the case.

Note that the narrator of Penny’s previous audiobooks, Ralph Cosham, died after narrating book 10 and this is the first one narrated by Robert Bathurst. I was sorry to hear of Ralph’s death as he was, for me, the real Armand Gamache as well as the other Three Pines characters. Robert does a good job and I am sure I will get accustomed to his narration, but I still miss Ralph.

The Word is Murder

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by Anthony Horowitz, 2028, Audiobook narrated by Rory Kinnear, HarperAudio 4.0 stars

The book is an entirely innovative approach to a mystery novel. The author, Anthony Horowitz, inserts a fictional character to accompany a crime investigator solving a murder. That fictional character is himself, Anthony Horowitz, the author of the book. Horowitz pictures himself as a Watson type character to other individual’s Sherlock type skills.

The crime they investigate is the murder of a woman by strangulation, the same day she went to a funeral home to arrange her funeral. It seems an odd circumstance that less than six hours after leaving the funeral home she is strangled in her own home. Hawthorne is a former police officer who is hired as a consultant to investigate the murder.

I am currently listening to Louise Penny’s novels that center on another homicide investigator, Armand Gamashe. Gamashe is gentle, kind, and has a very open personality. Hawthorne is evertthing Gemasch is not; he is annoying, abrupt, private, and totally unlikable. It’s fun to experience these two contrasting murder investigators and see their differing approaches to solve a crime.

The characters in the book are done well and the narration is excellent. The writing is also very good. I enjoyed listening.

The plot of this book isn’t the most compelling, but it is well constructed. I didn’t figure out who was committing these murders, but, if I had been paying attention I might have solved the crime before the murderer was revealed. I am rating it a four-star book primarily because of the author’s clever insertion of himself in the novel.

The Great Alone

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by Kristin Hannah, 2018, Audiobook narrated by Julia Whelen, Macmillan Audio 3.5 stars

This is a good book that could have been better. It’s about a young girl living in a disfunctional family. The father is a Viet Nam veteral who was captured and tortured during the war.

The book describes how life is for people who migrate to Alaska, particularly how tough the winters are. The author tells how much the young girl is in love with her boyfriend, but she does it over and over. She could have toned that down a bit to make the book more enjoyable and also a bit shorter.

The descriptions of the Alaskan environment and the characters who inhabit it are well done. The story itself is interesting but made less so by Hannah’s repetitiveness..

The Long Way Home

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A Chief Inspector Gamache Mystery Book 10, by Louise Penny, 2014, Audiobook narrated by Ralph Cosham released in 2014, Macmillan Audio 3.0 stars

This book takes a step back in pace. It’s about the search for Peter Morrow who was supposed to return home after a year of separation from his wife, Clara. The search is interesting but it is a slow process to trace where Peter has traveled and to discover why he went to the various places.

The ending is again rather abrupt and not very satisfying, something I’ve found in many of Penny’s books. After listening to ten Armand Gamache books in this series the enjoyment I get from them is the journey and not the final result.

How the Light Gets In

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A Chief Inspector Gamache Mystery Book 9, by Louise Penny, 2013, Audiobook narrated by Ralph Cosham released in 2013, Macmillan Audio 3.5 stars

This book has a lot going on, particularly regarding Inspector Gamache’s relationship with the individuals who were running the Quebec security organization as well as his relationship with his former sidekick, Jean-Guy Beauvoir. As in Penny’s other books, there is one murder that Gamache is trying to solve, but that murder becomes secondary to the main plot, which is Gamache’s struggle to root out corruption in the security agency.

Unfortunately, this book left me hanging as the solution to the murder mystery was not very satisfying. In addition, the reconcilement between Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir seemed too abrupt and artificial

The book had a lot more potential than the result delivered.

Force of Nature

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by Jane Harper, 2018, Audiobook Narrated by Stephan Shanahan, Macmillan Audio 1.0 stars

I was very disappointed in this book. We borrowed the audiobook from the library in Rhode Island to listen to while making our annual return to Florida for the winter. I had listened to two of Harper’s other book, the first one being The Dry which introduced the character of Aaron Falk, a financial forensic investigator. I thought he was an interesting character and thought that this book would be a good followup to the previous one.

The major problem with the book is that there is no “there.” The plot centers on an camping outing into a wilderness park in Australian that is designed to build teamwork for five women who work for a company. One of the women disappears, but the others make it back. Aaron Falk receives a weak cell phone call from one of the women asking for help and then shows up to help investigate.

None of the five women were likeable, the circumstances surrounding the one woman’s disappearance turn out to be not very interesting, and glimpses into Falk’s personal life and character are sketchy at best. I was dissatisfied with the entire book.

The only positive aspect to the book was Shanahan’s narration. I reallly appreciate his Aussie accent that gives some authenticity to the book. As this is the second of Harper’s books that failed to meet my expectations, however, I will not be reading or listening to any more.

A Beautiful Mystery

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A Chief Inspector Gamache Mystery Book 8, by Louise Penny, 2012, Audiobook narrated by Ralph Cosham released in 2012, Macmillan Audio 3.0 stars

This mystery takes place in a remote monastery in Quebec where one of the monks is murdered. Inspector Gamashe is called in to solve the crime. The book, as its setting suggests, moves slowly, and it sometimes seems as slow as the Gregorian chants that are key to the solution of the crime. Along with solving the murder, however, Gamashe’s other troubles escalate, but the book provides no solution to these other troubles. Since the reader can’t leave things as they are, Louise Penny’s next book awaits.

There is much to be learned about Gregorian chants that the author includes in this book.

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

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by David Grann, 2023, Doubleday, New York 4.0 stars

This is the story of the Wager, a ship that was shipwrecked on the coast of Chile during the War of Jenkin’s Ear between England and Spain in 1740.

The ship was part of an armada that was assembled to attack a Spanish galleon of the Pacific coast of South America. Unfortunately, the ships encountered raging gales during their passage around Cape Horn and the sailors were significantly sickened by scurvy. The Wager eventually was shipwrecked near an island and the crew (or what was left of them after so many had died) managed to get to shore. Their struggles to survive as well as the eventual outcome is revealed in the book.

The book is well researched and written. The story, however, is depressing and unfolds very slowly. It is a long-forgotten episode in British naval history and deserves to be remembered for the insights and lessons it provides.

The Diamond Eye

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by Kate Quinn, 2022, Audiobook narrated by Saskia Maarleveld, Harper Audio 3.5 stars

This is an historical novel portraying Mila Pavlichenko, a Russian librarian who decided to become an expert marksman and was subsequently recruited to be a sharpshooter in the Russian army in WWII. She accumulated 309 confirmed kills and was then asked to travel to the United States to tour the country giving talks to encourage U.S. support of the Russian war efforts. While in the U.S. she meets FDR and becomes a close confident of Eleanor Roosevelt.

The book is well written and the narrator does an excellent job. Most of the information about Pavlichenko is actual fact, although the author acknowledges in the afterword that she added some incidents toward the end of the book. These additions made the book much more thrilling, but I would probably have given it a higher rating if she hadn’t strayed so far from the actual facts.

It was an interesting book to listen to and I hadn’t previously heard anything about this extraordinary woman.