What do readers think of A Trick of the Light by Louise Penny? Write your own review.

I haven't read any books by Louise Penny, but after reading A Trick of Light I will look for more of her books. I like mysteries and this book was exactly what I was looking for. I can usually predict the outcome of a story, but was pleasantly surprised that I didn't figure the ending out until the end...the way it's supposed to be!

I’ve read all of the Three Pines series and enjoyed them immensely. Bury Your Dead was so good, both the plotting and the characters, I felt it would be hard to top. And while A Trick of the Light does not meet that high bar, it is still a worthy addition to Penny’s oeuvre. A Trick of the Light is all about relationships, those between friends, between spouses, between mentors and mentees; even between humans and pets. While watching Gamache solve the mystery of who killed an old friend of Clara Morrow’s in Clara’s garden, we get to revisit the Three Pines folks and Gamache's team, with Clara and Peter Morrow and Jean Guy Beauvoir center-stage. The reader is also treated to an inside look at the workings of Alcoholics Anonymous, from an author who knows it well. There are some tantalizing loose ends left dangling which I am sure Penny will sew up in the next installment, and I’ll be in line to read it.

A Trick of the Light is the seventh in the Three Pines/Armand Gamache series of mysteries and is as well written and as enjoyable as the first book in the series. After the opening of artist Clara Morrow's solo show at the Musee in Montreal the villagers from Three Pines return home for a celebration. The next morning Lillian Dyson, a former friend of Clara's is found dead in Clara's backyard. Chief Inspector Gamache and his team are quickly trying to solve the case which revolves around the art world in Montreal as well as Clara's childhood. There is also drama with Gamache's team. Fans of the series will certainly enjoy this installment, but newcomers can easily catch up with these very interesting characters.

This is my first time reading a Louise Penny book so I came to it with no preconceived expectations. Overall I found her to be quite good at writing, certainly a master of nuance, innuendo, and subtlety with this particular book. Maybe the subject/theme was a little esoteric, but still the characters were well drawn and interesting. I enjoyed the fact that so many of the characters were suspects of the murder, the perpetrator could have been anyone of several persons. The book is intelligently written, Ms. Penny did an excellent job of research on this story and provided a good eye into the world of art dealers and artists in general. My small quibble with this book comes from the fact that I have not read previous books in this series, and there is an abundance of references to, what I presume to be, the prior book in the series. The events in the previous book seemed to be critical to an underlying part of this book. I felt like I was not in on it because I did not read that book. There is an issue between Inspector Gamache and Inspector Beauvois that is directly related to what took place in the prior book. I realize that series books will usually relate back to previous books just to make a first time reader get a little history of the main characters but what happened in a prior book is often not a crux of the current story. Anyway, it's a small thing and might only bother me. I want to know more about what happened in the last book, so I will go out and buy the book. Hummm, maybe that is the point.

I was excited to read the latest installment in this mystery series featuring Chief Inspector Gamache - it felt like going back to a special place and catching up on the lives of the unique people who live there. The fact that it was a mystery was almost secondary to finding out what has happened in Three Pines since the last book in the series. In that regard, the book does not disappoint, although in the end it does raise more questions than answers, with uncertainty for several of the characters. The mystery itself was not as interesting as some of the earlier books, but still entertaining, although you begin to wonder how many people can be murdered in one small village!

This mystery gets off to a clunky start, with the author awkwardly presenting background from the previous book in this series. Penny's hallmark is the emotional luminosity of her writing, but that was only spottily in evidence here and there in the book, particularly in the ending. I had a hard time believing that jealousies and feelings in the art world are as murderous as portrayed in this book, but I still feel drawn to her village of Three Pines and the characters who appear throughout her series.