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

by Louise Penny

A room full of grief was even worse than a room full of anger. Anger a person got used to, met most days, learned to absorb or ignore. Or walk away from. But there was no hiding from grief. It would find you, eventually. It was the thing we most feared. Not loss, not sorrow. But what happened when you rendered those things down. They gave us grief.

What killed people wasn’t a bullet, a blade, a fist to the face. What killed people was a feeling. Left too long. Sometimes in the cold, frozen. Sometimes buried and fetid. And sometimes on the shores of a lake, isolated. Left to grow old, and odd.

After years of investigating murders Chief Inspector Gamache knew one thing about hate. It bound you forever 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.

Grief was dagger-shaped and sharp and pointed inward. It was made of fresh loss and old sorrow. Rendered and forged and sometimes polished.

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.