A Fatal Grace is the second episode of the Armand Gamache/Three Pines series. The series is set in the Eastern Townships region of rural Quebec, southeast of Montreal and just north of Vermont. Armand Gamache works for the Surete du Quebec, the provincial police force based in Montreal, and he often investigates crimes that occur in or around the remote village of Three Pines.

Although the Three Pines folks are a tolerant bunch, they can find themselves pushed to their limits when faced with intrusive outsiders. This is what has happened now. Cecilia "CC" de Poitiers and her family have bought the old Timmer Hadley house, the mansion up on the hill. CC is a self-promoting author from Montreal who is setting herself up as a self-help happiness guru. The trouble is, she is far from being a poster child for happiness herself. She's combative, nasty and downright cruel to just about everyone, including her own husband and daughter. So it shouldn't surprise anyone at all when she ends up murdered, in a very odd and yet deliberate fashion, during a post-Christmas village game of curling. The first question can't be, "Who had a motive?" -- because just about everybody did. Armand Gamache and his Surete investigators must figure out exactly what happened to CC.

If two books can share the same settings and the same characters and can yet be exact polar opposites, it's this book and Still Life, the first story in the series. In that one, a good and decent townswoman was found dead on the first page. Who could have possibly wanted to get rid of Jane Neal? Everyone loved her. In this book, a pretty despicable character -- and an infiltrator into this small, otherwise friendly community -- continually flails verbal barbs at everyone who gets in her way, until she finally ends up dead at the end of Chapter 8, on page 60. And yet, even with the circumstantial differences, the same investigative team from the Surete must again venture to Three Pines to see what it can uncover.

Enter mild-mannered Chief Inspector Armand Gamache; his amusing second-in-command, Jean Guy Beauvoir; detail-oriented Agent Isabelle Lacoste; and everyone's least-favorite agent, Yvette Nichol. Local agent Robert Lemieux brings them up to speed on the details of the crime. And then Gamache takes it from there. Along the way, we learn more about both the Surete officers and the Three Pines residents. We meet "the three graces," the elder women of the village: Emilie Longpre, Kaye Thompson and Beatrice "Mother" Mayer. Clara Morrow begins to emerge as one of the key locals whom Gamache befriends and confides in. And we hear more references to the Arnot case, which happened well before we met these individuals. Yet it continues to plague the way the Surete operates.

This book also provides the first instance of crusty poet Ruth Zardo's definition of "FINE" (on page 166 in the paperback edition). Pay attention, because the term is not always re-defined when it is used in the rest of the series. The characters, even Gamache, eventually use it as a shorthand.

A Fatal Grace is the first book in the series that is set in winter. (It won't be the last.) Now we experience on the printed page some of the bitter harshness that Quebec residents have to deal with every year. Yes, they really live this far north. You can get chills just by reading and by imagining these snowy scenes for yourself. No wonder people have to bundle up to go outside.

Louise Penny shows us how separate story threads can eventually weave together in ways that even the savviest of readers may not have thought of. She also uses the third-person point of view so that we can peek in on scenes that don't immediately concern the main characters. These strategies work together to create a fulfilling experience for any mystery reader.