A World of Curiosities by Louise Penny Review: A Series High Point Worth Discovering

A World of Curiosities is a career-defining entry in Louise Penny's Chief Inspector Gamache series, confirming her standing as one of crime fiction's most accomplished practitioners.

A World of Curiosities is the eighteenth installment in Louise Penny's long-running Chief Inspector Gamache mystery series, published by Minotaur Books on November 29, 2022. The novel unfolds across multiple timelines. In the past-set strand, a young Armand Gamache arrives at a remote detachment to investigate the murder of Clotilde Arsenault, a woman found dead in a lake who had been prostituting her two young children, Fiona and Sam. That case, depicted here for the first time in the series, is the very investigation that forged Gamache's professional bond with his headstrong second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir — now also his son-in-law. In the present-day strand, Fiona Arsenault is graduating from college after serving prison time for killing her mother; Gamache and his wife, Reine-Marie, have supported Fiona over the years, almost drawing her into their family circle. Meanwhile, a hidden room discovered by examining the roofline of Myrna's bookstore in Three Pines yields a strange, centuries-shrouded painting, and a letter written by a long-dead stonemason — filled with dread over his reasons for bricking up that attic room — adds yet another strand to the investigation. A series of present-day homicides in the village runs alongside all of this, with the mysterious artwork providing the through-line linking past and present.

Few long-running crime series manage to deliver a genuinely revelatory installment at book eighteen, yet A World of Curiosities does exactly that by returning to the origin story of Gamache and Beauvoir's partnership. Globe and Mail book columnist Margaret Cannon described the novel as one of the best in all eighteen books and wrote that Penny was "at the top of her game." Kirkus Reviews called the opportunity to watch Gamache and Beauvoir's relationship develop "what makes this book one of Penny's best." The novel arrived in late 2022 as Amazon Prime Video began streaming Three Pines, an adaptation of earlier books in the series, giving both longtime readers and newly curious viewers a compelling entry point into Penny's fictional Quebec. It was an immediate number one bestseller on the hardcover fiction charts.

The novel's ambition lies in its multi-strand architecture — Penny binds a present-day cozy-inflected village mystery, a harrowing decade-old child-abuse case, and a centuries-old enigma around a single painting, all without losing coherence or momentum. BookPage, in a starred review, praised her for weaving "all these narratives — the series of modern-day killings, the decade-old bludgeoning murder and the haunting artwork that has remained shrouded in mystery across the centuries — with a master's deft hand," calling the novel "a narrative tour de force." Kirkus Reviews noted the plotting is complex and the characters as vivid as ever, and observed that Penny will have readers "turning the pages as fast as you can to see how she'll manage to tie everything together." The novel also incorporates the real-life 1989 École Polytechnique massacre in Montreal, including real-life survivor Nathalie Provost, grounding the fiction in one of Canada's most painful historical moments with evident care for its weight.

Critical reception was strongly positive across major outlets. Writing in The Telegraph (India), Kajori Patra described the novel as dramatic, frightening, and thrilling, while also noting that it deliberately confuses the reader — a structural choice that will energize some readers and frustrate others who prefer tightly telegraphed plotting. Patra further observed that the book ends with an unexpectedly abrupt conclusion, a point worth flagging for readers who prize tidy resolutions. Alison Flood, writing for The Guardian, offered one of the review's most memorable characterizations: that the novel, "unusually for a crime novel, leaves you feeling better about the world once you've finished" — a testament to the moral warmth Penny builds into even her darkest material.

Readers who have followed Gamache across previous entries will find particular reward here, given that the novel illuminates the formative case behind one of crime fiction's most beloved professional partnerships. That said, the novel's built-in backstory richness also makes it a more demanding entry point for those new to Three Pines; readers unfamiliar with Gamache, Beauvoir, and the village's established ensemble will miss layers of resonance that series veterans will take for granted. For those committed to the series — or willing to do some catching up — A World of Curiosities represents exactly the kind of ambitious, emotionally grounded work that has kept Penny's readership devoted across nearly two decades. The audiobook edition, narrated by Robert Bathurst, was a finalist for the 2024 Audie Award for Mystery, offering a further option for those who prefer that format.