How the Light Gets In, published by Blackstone Audio at the end of August, is another fine example of the great partnership of author Louise Penny and audiobook narrator Ralph Cosham. It’s the ninth novel about Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec.
If you haven’t heard of these books yet, where have you been? The author writes a unique blend of police procedural and cozy mystery that seems to please both literary fiction fans and suspense fans, as well as readers who “don’t read mysteries.” Louise Penny blends dark and light themes, using humor and the fully developed personalities of her characters to keep death and its attendant depression and despair from overwhelming the reader.
Also, the audiobook narrator Ralph Cosham, as I and many other audiobook listeners have said before, IS Armand Gamache. No other voice will do.
These books about Chief Inspector Gamache and his fellow homicide detectives, their families, and their friends in the remote village of Three Pines, are also a good example of why they should be called a sequence, not a series. “Series” used to mean that you could pick up any book – the first or the thirty-first – and find a complete story with just enough about the characters to get by on, and you would get the skinny on the characters in every book, because they stayed pretty much the same from one book to the next. It was often even different authors writing the books, all under the same pen name. Series books were formulaic, so readers familiar with the series would get what they expected and new readers could jump in any time with no problem.
Series books are different now. They are sequential in more ways than by publication date. Characters develop. Circumstances change. If you read a book out of order, you’re going to hit major spoilers for the book that came before. The main character could be married or newly divorced, thought dead, gone into retirement or come back out of retirement; secondary characters could actually BE dead, or be double agents, or be having an affair.
This is a problem for publishers, and librarians, and probably booksellers too. And not just because publishers seem to be unwilling to print the series titles in order inside the book anymore. We all want people to be as excited as we are that the latest book in one of our favorite series is out, but a reader who starts reading Louise Penny with How the Light Gets In is not going to have the benefit of understanding how events in the earlier eight books have built up to the crucial moments for Chief Inspector Gamache and his department that take place in How the Light Gets In.
So the bad news about these books being a sequence and not a series is: you need to start with Still Life and keep reading until you get to this one. The good news is: you’re going to love all of them.
If you’re an audiobook listener, you will want to listen to these! Even if you don’t like mysteries.
How the Light Gets In
Penny, Louise
Cosham, Ralph
Blackstone Audio
August 2013
9781427233011
$39.99 US
approx 13 hours on 11 CDs
Disclosure: I borrowed this audiobook from the public library.
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I do love this author – haven’t read this one yet.
My sister warned me I’d better not put any spoilers in, so I didn’t say anything about the plot!
I never thought about series from this perspective, but your comments on it make sense. I know when I was reading all of those series back when I was a kid (Babysitters Club, Animorphs, Boxcar Children…) I didn’t worry about the order, and it was generally okay. It seems odd that publishers wouldn’t make it clear that a book is in a series, but I guess they get better sales that way, even if the reader experience is worse. Darn money-grubbing publishing people! 😛
They just have to be sneaky because their profit margin is so small!