ETA: this contains a lot of spoilers.
My review of The Grey Wolf complained about a number of improbable coincidences and bizarre behaviors. I was about 40% into this sequel and the movie mob plot line was going strong and I thought, aha, maybe she will actually revisit some of those nonsensical dangling threads and explain them! She did not. Almost none of the complaints i listed last year were explained. Mob-adjacent murder nun? Seemingly benevolent monk treats his niece like crap resulting in a lifelong estrangement and her turning into a supervillain? Homeless shelter/Paolo subplot? The newspaper prints a recipe featuring an obscure liquor that is also used as a secret message? Apparently all these ridiculous things were actually coincidences because none of them were revisited.
Cons:
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multiple flip-flops in identification of the Bad Guy. Happened too many times, I ran out of patience.
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Why are there three female police officers with the names Yvette, Isobelle, (ETA: this is like having 3 characters who are named John, Jacob, and Joseph. Names are too similar). and Evelyn? A small quibble but increased friction while reading.
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Nobody in three pines really needed to be in this book.
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Moretti fizzled, his capture was anticlimactic, and the capture of the correct planes was confusing.
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Motivation: why. Narrator actually explains why the PM wouldn’t take these actions, with convincing reasoning. He is recently elected. He is charismatic. He is a liberal politician (and yet he takes actions that would be 100% believable as the actions of a contemporary conservative politician). He isalready in power. So why does he orchestrate a mass murder and treason? Literally why? Is it for money? Blackmail? It’s completely unconvincing and unexplained, they just realize it had to be him.
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US subplot/conspirators unexplained. Who killed the general and why? Was the President involved?
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Evelyn and Yvette are apparently dating at the end of the book?!? Just dropped in there without elaboration. Excuse me, they are boss and employee AND I don’t think that was breadcrumbed at all even though there were viewpoint sections from each of them.
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It’s not actually a secret that the US has invasion plans for about every country and runs war games on them. I’m not exactly a DC insider and I know about that.
Please allow me to explain that I have no problem believing that people exist who make terrorist attacks or plan political coups. I just believe they would have motivations like greed or power-madness or revenge or whatever – motivations that would actually have evidenced themselves in their previous conduct. It’s not as if politicians are out there pretending to be good people to cover their true motivations these days. They are openly corrupt and greedy and authoritarian. Penny’s failure to engage with this new reality is the big disappointment here. She definitely wanted to deal with the current political situation but because she set this book in an alternate reality with a different US President the math doesn’t work. It’s all very well to talk about climate threat but that’s kind of ‘by the way’ when it comes to current US administration actions/words towards Canada.
Pro: One of the redeeming qualities of this book is that Gamache wasn’t betrayed by an old friend who turns out to have been a corrupt murderer all along.
The Evelyn Tardiff subplot and her true allegiance was handled well and was suspenseful. (But in thinking over it, did it matter? Every action she took could have been interpreted either way. In the end she was only taken out by Moretti because she was discovered taking clandestine photographs of him – photographs that didn’t actually make a difference, only confirmed what had been deduced through other data. Her capture/rescue was surprisingly low stakes as a result.)
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The short-lived ambiguity about Agent Nichol was more interesting.
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I enjoyed Shona and thought she was well-used.
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Ruth appears in her more compos menti form, which is much more interesting.
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The device of the Opera House was great and used to very good effect
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Fewer of the ridiculous behaviors or leaps of reasoning from previous book, I didn’t notice any egregious editing lapses along the lines of the coffee cup or the repeated lake scene.
Penny’s outstanding strengths in the past were:
1) the charming atmosphere of Three Pines (which can only be stretched to cover so many murder plots)
2) her treatment of art and artists
3) emotional depth of character interactions
4) the friction inherent in the French/English population divide
None of the above have been showcased by her more recent books. If I were Penny’s editor I would suggest her next book refocus on one of the above. Something that takes her characters completely out of the national stage like a locked room mystery or a bottle play.
Of course I am not her editor and I hope she never reads this, actually, because she seems like a really nice person who shouldn’t b reading opinions of her work from randos online, that’s a recipe for unhappiness. I wish her only the best and I understand why she’s taken the directional changes that she did, I just wasn’t able to personally go along with the ride.
by FlipDaly