Louise Penny is a Canadian crime novelist, born in Toronto in 1958. She spent eighteen years as a radio host and journalist with the CBC before leaving in 1996 to write fiction. Her debut, Still Life, introduced Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec and won the Arthur Ellis, Anthony, Barry and Dilys awards for best first novel. The Gamache books are set largely in Three Pines, a fictional Quebec village, and have since won multiple Agatha and Anthony awards. In 2021 she co-wrote...
A Trick of the Light
A Trick of the Light
Synopsis
Clara Morrow has finally had her solo show at the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Montreal, and the party afterwards in Three Pines is the happiest night of her life. In the morning, a woman is found dead among the bleeding hearts and lilacs in her garden.
The dead woman is Lillian Dyson — once Clara's closest friend, later the critic whose review nearly ended her career. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his team follow the case into Montreal's art world, a place of patrons, dealers and rivals where praise and malice are difficult to tell apart, and where almost everyone had reason to resent Lillian.
A Trick of the Light is the seventh Chief Inspector Gamache novel. It is a book about forgiveness and its limits — about what people are willing to do to be seen, and how easily a thing can look like one shape in the light and another in the dark.
Vibe
Genres
Characters
Armand GamacheProtagonist
Chief Inspector of homicide, investigating a killing in the garden of a friend.
Clara MorrowSupporting
Three Pines artist whose long-awaited solo exhibition is overshadowed by a body in her garden.
Lillian DysonSupporting
The victim: Clara's estranged childhood friend and the critic who savaged her work.
Jean-Guy BeauvoirSupporting
Gamache's second-in-command, still recovering from the raid.
Peter MorrowSupporting
Clara's husband, a painter whose success is eclipsed by hers.
