The latest Penny has dropped, and I've just finished reading it. It, in this case, being Louise Penny's The Black Wolf. Wow. It's an intricately constructed book and it's gripping and suspenseful in the extreme. I'd call it a page-turner, except half the time I was flipping the pages backwards instead forward after saying to myself: Wait a minute, did I just read what I thought I read?! Didn't she say something totally different about him just a couple of pages ago???

The first time I saw Louise Penny in person was around the time her second novel, Dead Cold, came out. She spoke in our public library auditorium to a sparse audience of perhaps a dozen people. At that time, she mentioned that she planned to write a Three Pines book set in each of the seasons, and I thought: Oh, good - that means there'll have to be another two books to go. When her fifth book was released, it felt like we'd hit the jackpot. But the best was yet to come, and The Black Wolf is the twentieth in the series, as well as being a companion piece to no.19, The Grey Wolf.

Another interesting comment she made back in the early days of the series was to the effect that she didn't want to write the kind of books that would make her feel scared to go to bed at night. It's particularly interesting in retrospect because her books have definitely become quite dark, even apocalyptic, over the course of the series. From a thematic point of view, her later books are definitely not cosies, although she doesn't really go in for graphic descriptions of blood and guts. Her characters are fully fleshed out individuals: they feel like people who could be our neighbours, our friends, or our family. There's a lot of humour in her books too.

The later books send some of our favourite fictional characters away from the safety and security of their fictional village to interact with real people in real places. The Black Wolf includes several scenes in the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, which straddles the border between Quebec and Vermont and has been in the news a lot over the past year:

https://www.haskelloperahouse.org

Blending fiction with reality, particularly in a book set in the present day, presents certain challenges, both for the writer and the reader.

For instance: journalist Paul Workman is a real live person, who plays himself under his real name in the book

https://oneworldinformation.com/paul-workman/

But the other journalist, Shona Dorion, who sees him as a mentor and also has a major role in the story is, I would assume, fictional or perhaps a composite of a few people.

Obviously there is a real live Prime Minister of Canada and a real live Deputy Prime Minister too. There's a Minister of Defence and a Chief of Staff. There's a U.S. President. And so on. And if any of these people are going to be serious bad guys in the book, or perhaps even if they're not, they obviously have to have different names and identifying features to avoid libel.

I think this is the first book of hers I've read in which a large part of the action occurs in Ottawa. And I have to say there were some descriptions in the book that gave me pause. For example, Gamache looks at a painting of skaters on the Rideau Canal, done well over a century ago, which he muses could, if it weren't for their old-fashioned clothing, have been painted last winter. Hmmm, really? I mean, the canal was finished in 1832, but the official skateway didn't open until 1971. Yes, I'm sure parts of it were occasionally used on an impromptu basis for skating or hockey, but when he reflects that "skaters still glided for miles along the frozen waterway", that sounded a bit off to me.

He goes on to remember his parents taking him skating there for the first time, when he was just a small boy. Which could be possible, I guess, except that it would make Gamache a fair bit younger than I thought he was supposed to be. Mind you, the speed with which an author ages their main characters is a whole topic in itself. I think we have to allow a fair amount of literary licence here, as characters and series sometimes have an unexpected longevity that defies human limitations! Gamache does seem to have a bit of a gift for reverse-aging, though: In the first book, Still Life, we learn on page 2 that he's in his mid-fifties, "at the height of a long and now apparently stalled career"; in the very next book, Dead Cold, we are told that "though he was only in his early fifties, there was an old world charm about Gamache, a courtesy and manner that spoke of a time past."

The pacing in The Black Wolf is another little niggle I have with it. As mentioned above, it is for the most part action-packed, a whirlwind of new twists and turns minute to minute. That I find appropriate for this type of book. But then in the last couple of chapters, several months elapse with the total time-frame for the book comprising a year. That's fine if it's really a kind of dénouement, with loose ends being tied up. Except that in this case, a couple of chapters totally change the course of the story arc. I found it jarring. There was too much telling rather than showing, and moments where Gamache did things that weren't in my opinion What Gamache Would Do.

All that said, I'll still keep reading the Three Pines books for as long as Louise Penny keeps writing them, or as long as I'm still around to read them. I'd also love to read a sequel to State of Terror, which she co-wrote with Hillary Rodham Clinton.

More on Louise Penny and her books here:

https://www.louisepenny.com/books.htm

And here's a link to Brome Lake Books in her home town:

https://bookmanager.com/1178946/?q=h