I finished the most recent Louise Penny book at four o’clock this morning.  It’s a book that has been by my bedside for weeks.  Months, really.  It has traveled with me to at least three hospitals and to doctors’ appointments too numerous to remember.  To make matters worse, it’s a library book and I owe fines on it that must be the equivalent of two or three more hard copies for their shelves.

I feel guilty about that, which is probably fitting because the book is about conscience – among other things.  It is Ms. Penny’s thirteenth book in her series about Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and the villagers of Three Pines in Quebec – a village that does not exist but that is so compelling that five of us from the Peninsula went in search of it a year ago last September.  We did not expect to find it, of course, but we made many wonderful discoveries directly related to the author and her bestselling series.  (Ask any one of us, though, and we’ll probably give you pretty exact directions so you can do your own looking!)

Usually, I race right through Louise Penny’s books, gobbling up every delectable detail and nuance.  This one… not so much.  Glass Houses was equally well written, the characters as finely drawn, with the plot bordering on reality.  Perhaps that was the trouble.  I found the book ‘dark’ in the ominous sense without much relief, comic or otherwise.  I’d pick it up, read a few pages, and then have to put it down for a while.  Usually, for a long while.

Because our lives have been so fractured lately, I’ve not yet had a chance to talk to any of the other Three Pines Trekkers about Glass Houses.  I wonder if they found it difficult, as well.  Or was it just a matter of timing – an intersection of events in my own life that made it the wrong choice just then (and then and then and then…)?  Still… I recommend it highly but, as always, with the caveat that, if you are new to Louise Penny, read the books in order and from the beginning.  When you finish the thirteenth, tell me what you think.

Meanwhile, I’ve already begun another book – one that Leigh gave us when she visited Nyel at the UW Medical Center. It’s The Double Comfort Safari Club by Alexander McCall Smith.  It, too, is full of old friends from “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” and, interestingly, it’s also the thirteenth of the series.  It was copyrighted in 2011, so I doubt if it’s the most recent.  And, in fact, I’m not even sure that I haven’t already read it.  The only sure thing is that it will be the polar opposite of the book I just finished – nothing dark about Mr. Smith’s stories.  Actually, when reading his books I sometimes feel there’s no there there.  Just what I should have been reading all these past weeks and months!