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The Beautiful Mystery

The Beautiful Mystery

MysteryPolice Procedural
Published
2012
Language
English

Synopsis

Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups is a monastery so remote that for centuries no outsider knew it existed. Then two dozen cloistered Gilbertine monks made a recording of Gregorian chant, and the world came looking. Now their choirmaster lies dead in the abbot's garden, and for the first time the door is opened — to Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir.

The monks have taken a vow of silence. The killer is certainly one of them. As Gamache works through a community divided over the recordings that brought them fame, Beauvoir is left exposed to a very different threat, and Superintendent Francoeur arrives with his own reasons for being there.

The Beautiful Mystery is the eighth Chief Inspector Gamache novel: a locked-room mystery in the truest sense, and the book in which the long war inside the Sûreté finally reaches the people Gamache loves most.

Prose complexity
7/10

Vibe

MysteriousAtmosphericTenseReflectivePhilosophicalDark
Locked RoomBetrayal

Genres

Mystery Police Procedural Crime Literary Fiction

About the author

L
Louise Penny

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...

Characters

Armand GamacheProtagonist

Chief Inspector of homicide, admitted into a closed monastery to find a murderer among its monks.

Jean-Guy BeauvoirProtagonist

Gamache's second-in-command, whose recovery from injury leaves him dangerously vulnerable.

Sylvain FrancoeurAntagonist

Superintendent of the Sûreté du Québec, whose arrival at the monastery serves his own ends.

Dom PhilippeSupporting

The abbot of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups.

All characters in The Beautiful Mystery