Book 9 - Brûler vos navires!

Title: Glass Houses Author: Louise Penny Genre: Small-town big-time meurtre-mystère

I'll be honest; I read this book wayyy too fast. It was just so tense - in a good way. I wanted to know the answers, so I pelted headfirst towards them, perhaps at the cost of appreciating the more minute details of the novel.

OH WELL.

Characters were a bit tough to keep straight in this novel. Even by the last few pages, I still had to actively sift through my memory to pull up a face, or a backstory; sadly, it wasn't immediate. There are maybe...2 too many main-ish characters? The ones that really stick out (the Gamache's, Ruth and Rosa, Lea...) are way more salient than the others, and the book might have benefited from focusing on developing a smaller cast of characters instead of stretching over so many people. These outlier people were interesting, for sure, but the novel feels crowded with POVs that may contain some critical information, but could have easily been communicated through a different character. To top that, the reader also hops around in time. We jump in before, during, and after the investigation, and before and after the trial - and there's no real indication this switch is happening besides the weather, and other obvious contextual cues. I would have benefited from even an indication of month, or maybe some kind of countdown.

Okay, enough with the negative stuff. Besides all that, this book is absolutely engrossing - to the point where I nearly missed my bus stop more than once while reading it. The language is very lovely, and j'adore the incorporation of French into the prose (not bakery, but boulangerie; not boss, but patron; merci's and oui's all around!).

The best part of this novel, however, is the cobrador - which I cannot, in good conscious, talk any more about because this is, after all, a murder-MYSTERY, and the cobrador is a huge part of the mystery part. And the murder part. Okay, okay, all of it! Just know that the cobrador is what gets things in motion, and it's cool and creepy and brilliant.

Rating: 🍮🍮🍮/5

Would recommend with some words or warning,and might re-read