“There are people who are drawn to water, who retain some vestigial, primal sense of where it flows. I believe I am one of them. I am most alive when I am near the water, when I am near this water.”

Nel Abbott was fascinated by the river in Beckford, a small British town, and especially by the Drowning Pool: a place of dark and light, where teenagers came to swim, to jump off the steep cliff into the pool but also known as a suicide spot. When Nel is found dead in the pool, the assumption is that she committed suicide.

But her estranged sister, Jules, does not believe it. Nel was not the sort of person who would kill herself. Was her death linked in some way to the book she was writing about the women who had lost their lives there, including Katie, her daughter Lena’s best friend? And why was Nel obsessed with Libby Seeton, a young woman drowned at the pool for being a witch? Was she right in thinking Beckford was “a place to get rid of troublesome women”?  There is after all, a fair bit of misogyny lurking beneath the surface, both in the town’s present and its past. “People turned a blind eye, though, didn’t they? No one liked to think about the fact that the water in that river was infected with the blood and bile of persecuted women, unhappy women; they drank it every day.”

The story is from the points of view of eleven of the characters—Jules, Lena, Sean and Erin, the detectives on the case, Katie’s mother, to name a few—sometimes in third person, sometimes in first. What I enjoy about this device is that you get the same incident from more than one perspective, or one characters picks up the narrative from another and takes it further.

Like Paula Hawkins’s earlier book, The Girl on the Train, there are no really likeable characters here. But they are interesting because they all conceal secrets, which makes them somewhat unreliable as narrators.

This is a good thriller. Hawkins is skilful at building up the picture from fragments of stories. And the reveals at the end just keep coming! I think The Girl on the Train was better—this book is a little less unusual but will still keep you turning the pages.

Her dedication says it all: “For all the troublemakers”.

“There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole. There’s power enough in Heaven to cure a sin-sick soul.”

On the surface, this seems like a regular whodunit. But it is more than that—a story about losing and finding yourself, about art and landscape, and escaping from your past.

Armand Gamache, the former Chief Inspector of Homicide with the Sureté du Quebec, has retired with his wife Reine-Marie to Three Pines, a village with other people like him—people who have left their pasts behind. There is Myrna, a psychologist who now runs a bookshop (and provides therapy to her friends), Clara, an artist, Ruth, a bad-tempered poet and her duck, Rosa (no one is sure whether it should be Ruth and her duck or Rosa and her human).

Every morning, Armand sits on a bench overlooking the village with a book in his hand, The Balm of Gilead. Every morning Clara sits next to him but does not say much. Then one day she tells him that she is worried about her husband, Peter, who has disappeared. An established artist when Clara became famous, Peter had trouble dealing with her success. Upset at his lack of support, she suggested they take a year’s break from each other. Exactly a year later, Peter was supposed to come back, and they would see how they felt. However, Peter, normally very meticulous, did not show up on the appointed day, nor did he call or write.

Armand hates the thought of going back to the world he had left behind, but Clara is a friend. He asks his son-in-law, Jean-Guy, who used to be his second-in-command, for help, and the group of friends try to track Peter down.

The missing Peter is the centre of the book, and Louise Penny slowly and skilfully builds up a picture of the man. He grew up with a domineering, vicious mother, who stifled his creativity. He is obsessive about order and his paintings reflect this: they are controlled, detailed and essentially soulless. Unlike Clara’s, whose portraits are much less technically proficient but are windows into the soul of the sitter.

The friends start making enquiries, and find that Peter has been to see his old professor, Paul Massey, who taught Peter and Clara at the Ontario College of Canadian Arts. Professor Massey is well-liked by the students—he is a kindly man, known for being a mentor to young artists. Clara remembers a messianic young professor, Sébastien Norman—he believed in a tenth muse, the muse of painting (it’s odd, there isn’t a muse for painting among the nine). Massey thought Norman was unstable and fired him. Norman has disappeared—the only sign of him is a painting in the school yearbook of a crazed man. Is it a self-portrait?

Eventually, the child of Peter’s sister Marianna shows them paintings that turn out to be ones that Peter made during the year he was on his own. The paintings break every rule, are wild and not very good. It feels like he was going against everything that had been important to him. What was Peter trying to say? Were they are reflection of his mind, an indication that he has gone off the rails or was he trying to tap into something deep inside himself?

Clara, Myrna, Armand and Jean-Guy track Peter down to the mouth of the St. Lawrence river, a place that is so wild and inhospitable that the mariners called it the land God gave to Cain. There they find that Norman, calling himself No Man, had set up an arts community in the woods, and that Peter had followed him there. What happened in this wild place?

This is a slow-burning story. Unlike most whodunits, there is no body to kick things off. There is, instead, an exploration into identity and what lies beneath the surface. There is a “sin-sick soul” but it isn’t clear who that is until the end. I found this an absorbing and rewarding book. It’s one of a series Penny has written about Armand Ganache. I’m going to look for more of these.

This is a detective story set in Beijing that provides a glimpse into life in modern China with all its contradictions. The central character, Mei, is a private detective. She is approached by a family friend, Uncle Chen, to look for a Han dynasty jade seal. The seal had gone missing during the Cultural Revolution when the Red Guards destroyed many historical artefacts. Because so many of them were lost, the surviving artefacts are extremely valuable. If the jade were found, it would be a national treasure, but Uncle Chen wants to sell it on the black market. Mei, in spite of her better judgement, decides to take on the case.

The hunt for the jade is less important in itself than in what it unearths. The Cultural Revolution still throws long shadows: Mei’s father was sent to labour camp for being an intellectual. The family went with him, but her mother managed to get herself and her two daughters out, and Mei’s father eventually died in the camp.

Mei’s relationship with her mother is central to the book. It is a complicated one (as it often is). Mei adored her father and couldn’t understood why her mother abandoned him, and never really forgave her for it. Her mother wants her daughters to be successful and to be able to play the game, so to speak—something that Mei refuses to do. She feels that she has disappointed her mother.

Mei had a prestigious job at the Chinese State Security but, for reasons that become clear later, had to leave. She works on the margins, as private detectives are banned in China, relying on some of her contacts in State Security to help her. She earns enough to have her own apartment, a car and a very useful male assistant, but it’s not much compared to her sister Lu, who is extremely successful in television and is about to marry a rich man.

Mei’s mother has a stroke, which lands her in hospital. Who is the mysterious man who Uncle Chen brings to visit her? There are obviously family secrets that Mei knows nothing about. What is the eye of the jade? Although the old proverb says that the truth shall set you free, when Mei finally learns the truth, it is not liberating.

What I enjoyed about this book was the glimpse of life in modern China. On the surface, it seems to be a consumer society like many others, where money rules. However, the fallout from the Cultural Revolution still affects people, even those who were very young when it happened. It feels like different historical periods coexist in the city, along with the ever-present ghosts of the past.

Diane Wei Liang was in a labour camp with her parents when she was a child, and was part of the Tiananmen Square demonstration as a young woman. I think this book could have been longer with more about China’s past. As it stands, it is a light, enjoyable read, but one that could have done with a bit more heft.