The Nature of the Beast (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #11)

by Louise Penny

Next? Reine-Marie had thought when he’d said it a week ago. And she thought it again now, in the bistro, with the murmur of conversation, like a stream, flowing by her, around her. That one bedraggled word had washed up on her banks and set down roots, tendrils. A bindweed of a word. Next.

“Maybe that’s what hellfire’s made of. Burning books. I wonder if they’d appreciate the irony.”

This isn’t our parents’ generation, Armand. Now people have many chapters to their lives.

Ozymandias,’”

Clara remembered Al sitting on that chair at the funeral. The guitar on his lap. Silent. No songs left. Clara wondered if, like her art, his music was now gone forever. That great pleasure consumed by grief.

But in his fifties Armand Gamache knew that sitting still was far more difficult, and frightening, than running around.

Coaticook

“A doorbell?” Ruth asked. “I thought they were a myth, like Pegasus.” “And boundaries,”

He sat contentedly holding a glass of Scotch, like a benign grandfather among precocious children.

“In a way,” said Clara. “I think I might’ve gotten stuck. I haven’t even been able to paint. Nothing.” She waved toward her studio. “But after seeing the size of their loss, mine suddenly seemed manageable. And this”—she looked around the room—“is how I decided to manage it.

A soldier and a sailor met in a bar, Al sang in his raspy voice. The one said to the other, there you are.

busk

When upset, Reine-Marie liked to chop, to measure, to stir. To follow a recipe. Everything in order. No guessing, no surprises. It was creative and calming and the outcome was both comforting and predictable.

He had to remind himself that there was nothing supernatural about what he held in his hands. Nothing malevolent. It contained only the power he gave it.

leitmotif