My wife stumbled upon the first Louise Penny mystery, Still Life, in the Halifax Airport bookstore a few years ago. (A surprisingly good store, I recommend it to all on your next layover to St. John's.) We both rapidly became fascinated by Penny's writing, which is sometimes too precious, but always redeemed, because made more complex by, her turns towards hatred and anger.

These are really strange books (The Cruellest Month is the third; I expect there will ultiamtely be four; each is set during a season): a quite successful attempt to write a "village cozy" set in contemporary Quebec, combined with a sort of sweeping good v bad political narrative of the sort one might more typically find in a fantasy or science fiction text.

Using the poetry of Margaret Atwood and attributing it to the fictional poet Ruth Zardo also strikes me as kind of stroke of genius.

I recommend these books pretty highly: one the one hand, they are kind of lame; one the other, they are utterly compelling.

I hope this seems like a bit of an odd review, because the books themselves are.