A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny

I've made a decision for 2018: I'm not going to keep track of the quantity of books I read. I blew my numerical reading goal for 2017 out of the water with over 130 books last year, and this year, I'm going to try to actually read less. I want to read only books that make me happy, and not try to get through as many as possible. I also want to be more productive with other things, and try to accomplish more with my small amount of free time. So, I'm not going to number the books I read this year and I'll see how that works out for me.

I started listening to A Great Reckoning and of course, by the time I was 80% of the way done, I had to get the e-book and blast through it by reading it because I couldn't wait to see what was going to happen. This one was very good, but I kind of hated how so much doubt and negative feeling was cast in Gamache's way in this book, both that he could be the killer in the murder mystery and that he could have had an affair twenty-some-odd years ago. I mean, you KNOW that he didn't do either of those things, but everyone else starts to think that maybe he did, and he won't explain what's going on to stop everyone thinking it. I know that the genre of a mystery requires that there be a lot of, well, mystery, but it bugs me how Gamache always is keeping secrets from his colleagues, when there's really no point to keep them secret except for the dramatic reveal at the end, which is really only important for the narrative of the book and not for the investigation itself. I liked how the map figured into this book, which had a very sad backstory in the end, and I was glad that Penny didn't try to twist the story to fit the two narratives together (they just happened to be solved at the same time, but they didn't actually have anything to do with each other).

Anyways, a few of the things in this story didn't make much sense to me (like the Russian Roullette game that the professor was forcing his students to play--how is it POSSIBLE that that has been going on for years and nobody's ever died? And how would he have explained it if they had died? I'm so confused by this) but it worked well in the end.