A Rule Against Murder (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #4)

by Louise Penny

‘I can resist everything except temptation.’

‘You know those statues out there, the ones in the cemetery?’ Gamache nodded. ‘They’re not all the same size. Some people buy big ones, some smaller. Sometimes it depends on their budget, but mostly it depends on their guilt.’

After years of investigating murders Chief Inspector Gamache knew one thing about hate. It bound you for ever to the person you hated. Murder wasn’t committed out of hate, it was done as a terrible act of freedom. To finally rid yourself of the burden.

It’s a shame that creativity and sloth look exactly the same.’

All his childhood, all his teen years and into his twenties Armand Gamache had wondered why God had taken them both. Couldn’t He have left one, for him? It wasn’t a demand on his part or an accusation against a clumsy and thoughtless God, more of a puzzle. But he’d found his answer when he’d found Reine-Marie, had loved and married her and loved her more each day. He knew then how kind God had been not to take one and leave the other. Even for him.

Grief was dagger shaped and sharp and pointed inwards. It was made of fresh loss and old sorrow.

‘He thought a lot about wealth, you know,’ said Finney finally. ‘Obsessed with it, in a way. He tried to figure out what money bought. He never really figured it out. The closest he came was knowing that he’d be miserable without it, but honestly?’ Finney turned his ravaged face on Gamache. ‘He was miserable with it. It was all he could think of in the end.

She taught me that life goes on, and that I had a choice. To lament what I no longer had or be grateful for what remained.

The mind is its own place, can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven,’

‘We’re all blessed and we’re all blighted, Chief Inspector,’ said Finney. ‘Every day each of us does our sums. The question is, what do we count?’

Finney handed him back his hat, the hat he’d bought at the same time he’d bought one for Reine-Marie, after her skin cancer scare. So that she wouldn’t feel foolish in her huge, protective hat. They’d be foolish together. And safe together.