Book #129: How the Light Gets In by Louise Penny

These books are NOT good to listen to as audiobooks--because they are TOO ADDICTING and it's absolutely painful to have to trudge along at the pace of the reader instead of being able to sit down and blaze through the last half of the book to find out what happens. I spent the last few days just wandering around looking for things to do with my hands while listening to this book. This book reads like it's the end of the series, the climax of all of the drama and intrigue and conspiracy that has been hinted at for the last few books--but luckily, it's not, because I know there are four more already out there waiting for me. This book does have a murder mystery in it: a quintuplet is murdered (one of the famous ones born in the 1930's--based on a real family), and Gamache has to figure out who did it. But while Gamache does spend a bit of time investigating this murder and does eventually solve it, most of this book is about the secret conspiracy that Gamache's boss, the Superintendent of the Securite, is involved in, and how Gamache is trying to stop it. The book starts with everything at the lowest of the low; it all looks like Gamache is falling apart and Francoeur is about to win, but Gamache slowly but surely pulls it together and you can see that he had it all under control all along.

I love how Penny does such a good job of giving you a tiny bit of information at a time, to give you a small glimpse into what Gamache knows and what he's doing, but not enough to let you figure it out right away. She's pretty awesome at what she does. I feel like this book could have been kind of annoying to read and pretty over-the-top (especially with the whole government conspiracy doomsday thing) but because of the beloved characters and relationships, it didn't feel that way. Not to me, anyways. I loved Beauvoir's journey in the last few books, and was happy about the happy ending he got (spoiler alert, but not really that much of a spoiler!). I liked how Gamache seemed the most flawed in this book than he ever has--he made some mistakes, yelled at his friends, got mad when he shouldn't--but that makes sense, right? He was under pressure to basically save the world, all on his own, and that makes people make mistakes. But he always comes back to being the gracious, compassionate, kind person that he is. I'm glad this series isn't quite over yet, and I can't wait to get to the next one.