Louise Penny Launches a New Book

 Louise Writes: :This is it! August. The month THE BEAUTIFUL MYSTERY finally sees the light of day. Well over a year in the planning, thinking, researching, and then, the writing. And so much anticipation. I sometimes feel I'm going to explode from excitement/anxiety.

As you know, that simply goes with the territory. I suspect you often feel the same way, when something, or someone, you care about is about to be exposed to the public. I think anxiety isn't so much a mark of insecurity, as a reflection of how much we care.
I care a great deal about THE BEAUTIFUL MYSTERY. I can hardly wait for it to get into your hands. It hits bookstores, and kindles/nooks/ereaders/iPads on August 28th in the US, Canada and the UK. "



THE BEAUTIFUL MYSTERY is set in a remote monastery. A place of peace, and quiet contemplation, where monks only break their vow of silence to sing Gregorian chants - the word of God in the voice of God. But their lives are shattered when one of the monks is found murdered. And for the first time in 400 years men who are not monks enter their monastery, in the persons of Chief Inspector Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir.

Now, instead of telling you more about the book myself, I'm going to use an excerpt from one of the early reviews on Amazon.com: Here's part of what G. Kellner wrote -
I loved this one. Everything about it, from the well-written and compelling mystery to the daily life of a Gilbertine monk. I loved the way the monks were portrayed, as being men of God, but human nonetheless. I loved the dilemma of the monks--to continue to serve God in their quiet, humble way, or to go forward into society with their chanting, to raise the money to fix the monastery. I loved the subtlety of their communications, and the subtle and nuanced writing. There is a lot of conflict here--quiet conflict, but the whole book is one conflict after another. The monks vs. modern life, vows of silence vs. commercial chanting, Gamache vs. Francoeur, Gamache vs. Beauvoir, the abbot vs. the prior--on and on. It made for entertaining reading, but above all, I loved the atmosphere, the isolation of the monks, the peacefulness, the solitude and how that was horribly interrupted by so base and human a thing as murder. I thought it was brilliant.