The Nature of the Beast

The Nature of the Beast 

  - Louise Penny

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have quite mixed feelings towards this novel - the 11th book in the Inspector Armand Gamache series. On the positive side, it is a great thriller, with an amazing build up of the suspense and tension. It keeps you at the edge until a cinematic kind of climax. The atmosphere and the nuances of life in a close community in the face of a tragedy are wonderfully captured. As before, I like the way the primary characters in the series keep evolving and the way the important characters in this novel are developed.

On the downside, the basic premise behind the whole story – the incongruous weapon, seems well, incongruous. It may be based on factual events (of which I learnt afterwards), but the impression I gathered while reading it made the entire operation unbelievable, and my doubts about it are not at all smoothed out by what I read about the real man and the weapon he built. Secondly, this was quite gruesome. I started with an understanding that this was a cozy mystery series, and the first 2-3 books were indeed so. I was okay with them becoming gradually darker, but I don’t want so much blood and gore and psychopathy (which is the reason why I started reading cozies after all). As it becomes more oriented towards nail-biting action, I feel it is moving away from the charm of the calm study of its characters’ psychology.

I usually avoid writing about the story line or events (enough about that in the blurb and other reviews), unless there are specific points that I want to highlight or discuss. In this novel, we finally have answer to one significant question about Ruth’s personality – “who hurt you once”, though it seems to be over-articulated to me. Even so, for this incident to have as much impact as it did, she should already have been in a troubled place, and we do not yet gain an insight into that. Secondly, Gamache instrumenting the unauthorized release of an extremely dangerous criminal is uncharacteristic, and the reason for conspiring to do so is terribly synthetic. The ending made my heart cry out for the mother of Laurent Lepage, the highly imaginative young boy whose adventures come to an end a little too soon.