Writer paints dark picture

DETAILS

“A World of Curiosities,” by Louise Penny; Minotaur Books (398 pages, $29.99)

I’m always surprised to hear Louise Penny’s mysteries featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache referred to as “cozies.” The main traits of the cozy mystery — crimes committed offstage with a minimum of bloodshed — are not in Penny’s playbook. Many of her novels, including the newest, “A World of Curiosities,” are powered by disturbing violence and thrilling pursuit.

She opens this book with a flashback to Gamache’s first meeting with the man who would become both his professional right hand and his son-in-law, Jean- Guy Beauvoir. They first worked together on the murder of an addict and sex worker named Clotilde Arsenault. They soon discovered she had also trafficked her children, 13-year-old Fiona and 10-year-old Sam. Woven into that story is another flashback, to Gamache’s experiences on the day of the real-life mass shooting in 1989 at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, where a man slaughtered 14 women and injured another 14 people.

In the novel’s present day, Gamache and his wife are attending a ceremony at the college that combines a remembrance of the victims and the graduation of a new class of students that includes two young women close to them. One is Harriet Landers, the niece of Myrna Landers, a close friend of the Gamaches. The other is Fiona Arsenault, whom they helped after her mother’s murder.

The attention of everyone in Three Pines is soon drawn, to a perplexing letter forwarded to Myrna’s partner, Billy Williams. Written more than a century ago by a stonemason who was one of Billy’s ancestors, it describes a job the man did in Three Pines, a secret assignment to brick up a room. Finding the room is the easy part. What’s inside is confounding. At first glance it appears to be a work from the 17th century known as “The Paston Treasure,” but that painting is housed in a museum in England. The painting’s discovery will unleash a bloody retribution Gamache never expected, and that threatens not just his life, but everything dear to him.