Book Review: The Beautiful Mystery

The Beautiful
Mystery

The Beautiful Mystery, Louise Penny's eighth novel in the Inspector Gamache series, is literally a closed-door mystery. For it happens inside the monastery of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups, situated deep within the wilderness of Québec, where two dozen monks live, pray and sing in isolation. Though cloistered and devoid of human contact, the Gilbertines, as the monks are called, are ironically world-famous for their blissful chants, also known as The Beautiful Mystery for the effect it has on the listener. The peace and quietude thus enjoyed by the closed order is however ultimately disturbed when their choir director, a Frère Mathieu, is found dead by the abbot's secretary. Who could have committed so vile a deed? Could it be some outsider? But we, as masters of Locked Room Mystery 101, know that's next to impossible.

The story also abounds in analogies. As chief inspector Armand Gamache and his trusted sidekick (and future son-in-law, chronologically speaking) Jean-Guy Beauvoir of the Sûreté du Québec race against time to unmask the real identity of the perpetrator, Penny cleverly inserts parallels between the characters of Gamache and the abbot, both of whom are leaders troubled by the prospect of distrust, mutiny and schism within their circles, but have no choice but to face the challenge head-on in hopes that this too will pass. The mystery on the whole is engrossing and aptly meditative, if a little undone by its chaotic final act that sort of feels incongruent and a tad out of place in what's an otherwise meticulously crafted monastery murder. Best read as a series.