Augustus Landor is called to West Point Academy after the grisly discovery of a hanged cadet with his heart cut from his body. By that October night in 1830, Landor has retired to the Hudson Highlands for his health, after gaining some renown during his time as a detective in New York City. The case prompts the former detective to take on a young, moody assistant with keen observational skills named Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's murky past that changes with each telling leaves Landor wondering if his assistant might have a penchant for murder as well as drink, and his questions about his assistant only grow as the bodies continue to mount.
432 pages.
In this second Inspector Gamache novel, readers are returned to the Canadian village of Three Pines, where CC de Poitiers has been found mysteriously electrocuted while sitting in a lawn chair on a frozen lake, in front of the entire town, during the annual curling tournament. She is not a well-liked citizen, in fact, as Inspector Gamache and his team investigate, they determine that nearly everyone in the town disliked her. Slowly, but surely Gamache peels back layer after layer in his search
for the killer. With each layer peeled away, he learns something new
about the residents of the small town, about the deceased, and about the
murderer.
This first of the series introduces Chief Inspector Gamache of the Surêté du Québec and his team of investigators when they are called in to
the scene of a suspicious death in a rural village south of Montreal, Three Pines. Jane Neal, a beloved retired school teacher has been found dead on a trail in the nearby woods from an arrow. While the locals feel certain it must have been a hunting accident, Inspector Gamache isn't convinced, and he and his team skillfully investigate the cast of colorful characters and determine that it was indeed murder. This is a popular series that I look forward to enjoying.
This third selection in the Department Q series starts out rather slow. Two brothers are have been kidnapped and are being held in a remote boathouse. One of them manages to write a message in blood, seal it in a bottle, and drop in into the water. After 13 years and a trip from Scotland, said bottle and note lands on Detective Carl Mørck's desk. Large portions of the note had disappeared and it seemed almost impossible for Carl, Assad, and Rose to be able to solve this puzzle, let alone the crime. But solve it they did, and with such a compelling story that it was nearly impossible to put down. There is a passage in this story wherein a young mother is trapped under a pile of moving crates; it was so well written, so graphic that the reader him/herself feels trapped. So far, this has been the best in the Department Q series! A kidnapper who focuses on large families in closed religious communities; he kidnaps two of the children, demands a huge ransom, then kills one of the children and returns the other, telling the family that he is watching them. He will kill them all if reported to the police, which he knows they will be too afraid to do, and this is how the creep makes his living. He moves from town to town changing his appearance and identity with chameleon-like ease. It is chilling and seems nearly impossible for Department Q to resolve.
The second Department Q novel finds Detective Carl Mørck working at solving a two-decade old brutal murder of a young brother and sister. His investigation brings him into contact with a wily homeless woman and some of the most powerful captains of industry in Denmark. How will he and his unlikely team, Assad and Rose, are pulled into an intricate puzzle of a mystery that makes the book very hard to put down.
