Louise Penny/Chief Inspector Gamache (My Rating 1-2)

Maple syrup is great on pancakes but not on crime

(Departing with my usual schedule of every ten days as this will be one of my very rare negative reviews. I try not to watch things I don’t like and don’t want to inflict them on others. To all the Penny fans out there, this is just my take. Will resume with my more positive posts next week.)

When a friend told me about these books about a Quebecois detective from a Canadian writer, I was eager to try them. We’ve been to Quebec and enjoyed the summer street fair there. The stories are placed in the Eastern Townships, which sounded an interesting region to get to know. The imagined “perfect” little village of Three Pines serves as setting and the collection of characters living there either are or pop up in many of the 18 books in the Inspector Gamache series.

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is a member of the Sûreté du Québec and arrives first in Three Pines to investigate the murder – by bow and arrow – of an older member of the village. He meets and gets to know the artistic couple, the nasty old lady, the gay couple running the local hotel restaurant (the only fun folks there) and other somewhat strange residents. They all have back stories that unfortunately haunt the actual murder investigations. The plots overflow with the “maple syrup” of gooey coziness and inside baseball dynamics of the villagers. I tried the first few books to see if the series grew more to my liking but couldn’t finish #3 and gave up after #4.

I thought I’d give the Prime TV Three Pines version starring Alfred Molina a view. That was slightly better as it left out much of the syrup. But it introduced some out-of-place back stories that leaves the Inspector shot and perhaps dying in the last of the eight episodes. Amazon will not extend the series though we know Gamache must recover as the books continued. This TV version gets a Two from me while the books a One, really not recommended. (There is an even worse one-off TV version starring Nathaniel Parker, whom I like in his Inspector Lynley Mysteries.)

Interestingly, Penny also put Inspector Gamache as a minor character in a book co-written with Hillary Clinton. According to Wikipedia, in State of Terror with the U.S. facing a “series of terrorist attacks [that] throws the global order into disarray” the new Secretary of State “is tasked with assembling a team to unravel the deadly conspiracy, a scheme carefully designed to take advantage of an American government dangerously out of touch and out of power in the places where it counts the most.” I don’t think I’ll be reading this one.

https://comicbook.com/tv-shows/news/amazon-prime-video-cancels-alfred-molina-three-pines-season-1/