Book Review: Glass Houses

Glass Houses

When Louise Penny's latest 'philosophical' mystery Glass Houses opens, Armand Gamache is in the hot seat. Perspiring in the scorching heat of July sun. But also because he is on the witness stand for a murder that happened under his watch several months ago in Three Pines, a village that's on the road to nowhere. Not the sort of place you drive through on the way to somewhere else. And for Gamache, who is now the Chief Superintendent of the Sûreté du Québec, the key to solving the case lies in tackling a bigger crime, a "dark thing" that has descended upon them, testing him and threatening to unleash a wave of terror and destroy everything he has worked so hard to achieve.

Glass Houses, taken in that sense, holds up a mirror to one's conscience (a higher court than a court of justice, as Gandhi puts), while opening a window to the heart of Three Pines, which Penny sums up beautifully in her note: "The village does not exist, physically. But I think of it as existing in ways that are far more important and powerful. Three Pines is a state of mind. When we choose tolerance over hate. Kindness over cruelty. Goodness over bullying. When we choose to be hopeful, not cynical. Then we live in Three Pines." That she wrote the novel during a trying time (Penny lost her husband Michael Whitehead in Sept 2016) as an "escape in the dark hours of the morning" to slip into Three Pines "and for a few precious hours each day enter the world of Gamache, Clara, Myrna et al" tells the magical place she created is not just a safe haven for her, but for us, readers, too.