- This is the first book in the Amande Gamache detective series that I've read. And it will be the last.
- The novels are set in rural Quebec and Montreal, mainly centering around a delightful small village called Three Pines.
- However there's way too much trivial detail about the minor characters and their interactions. It gets very twee at times - folksy, homey, provincial and quite annoying.
- There's a flood emergency and it has almost nothing to do with the crime story, but it goes on and on and on. At 400 pages this book should have been 100 pages shorter. There’s so much padding. OK, we get it, author. You live there in real life and you want us readers to love it too.
- There are three separate stories actually: the crime, of course; the flood; and three or four old batshit crazy women and their daily ins and outs. No interconnection at all between the stories, apart from the characters and their personal relationships.
- In the murder story there's an undercurrent of family violence and abuse. It rises to the surface as the novel proceeds, and it's powerful and well written. This is the heart of the book.
- Some fictional narratives are like thick tapestries being slowly unraveled, but if the author takes forever to do it readers frequently lose the thread and it all just becomes irritating. This book is a prime example.
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