When the Gamaches arrive they are a bit surprised to find the inn almost full due to a booking by an extended family named Finney who is planning a ceremony to memorialize their late father.

It would be an understatement to label the Finneys as dysfunctional. There is so much animosity among the four grown children, their spouses and their mother that it is a wonder they can coexist on the same planet. This emotional powder keg is obvious to Gamache and his wife as they begin to doubt the restorative benefits of their holiday. Perhaps it would have been better to go on to Three Pines, a little village where they often spend the summer.

Armand and Reine-Marie are delighted when Peter and Clara Morrow, friends from Three Pines, arrive for the Finney family reunion. It turns out that Peter is the son of the patriarch mother’s first husband, Charles Morrow, the man for whom the memorial is being erected. Long fallen out of favor with the family, Peter is reluctant to attend the annual gathering, but has reluctantly agreed to do so this year. Clara is even more reticent, having calculated the number of waking hours she must spend in the company of her husband’s family.

Sometime during the evening before the day the memorial is to be unveiled, Julia Martin, one of Peter’s sisters, is discovered dead by a member of the inn staff. She was apparently crushed to death by the statue of Charles Morrow which had toppled from its pedestal. As Gamache is in residence at the time of the crime, familiar with the crime scene and some of the people present, he is engaged to conduct the investigation. No only must he come up with the perpetrator of the crime, but also the method. How did what was supposed to be a stable stone monument topple off its base?

Louise Penny has created in her Inspector Gamache series a clever combination of a police procedural and cozy mystery novel. Having a bona fide policeman as a protagonist lends a feeling of credibility and legitimacy to the pursuit of the wrongdoer, yet the nature of the deed divorces the tale from that of drug dealing, serial killer or great conspiracy type of crime.

The setting itself is reminiscent of the golden age of mysteries where the emphasis is on the puzzle component of the crime. Indeed this novel is a classic locked room mystery with the available suspects limited to those at the inn at the time the murder was committed.

Ms. Penny has a superb command of the English language. She is able to evoke images in the minds of her readers such that it is easy to imagine what her characters look like as well as the characteristics of the log cabin type inn where the story takes place. She describes the matriarch’s second husband, a man “so repulsive he was almost attractive, as though aesthetics were circular and this man had circumnavigated that rude world.”

The author has done an interesting thing with the main characters in her series. Instead of introducing them dully in the first of the series, she lets the situations in which they become involved gradually explain what has happened in their lives prior to the first novel in the series. In this way she is able to avoid the tedium of reintroducing each character in each book possibly boring her growing cadre of readers. She carefully plants an enigmatic seed in the beginning chapters of the book which reveal more about her major players as the novel progresses. We learn a bit more about Gamache’s background and a good deal about Peter Morrow.

As a mystery author, Ms. Penny plays fair with her readers. She drops enough clues that with enough prior knowledge the solution to the mystery may be unraveled by the astute reader. There is not a long winded explanation at the end as the facts speak for themselves. This is a novel that can and will be enjoyed by a variety of readers and is on a par with the first in the series, Still Life. A Rule Against Murder should go on everyone’s reading list.

--Andy Plonka