Darth Pedant

Maybe I'm still numb from The Brutal Telling. Maybe I'm tired of pivotal past events being fed to me in disjointed bits and pieces. Maybe those pivotal past events needed their own book to do them justice. Whatever the reason, I just did not connect to this book on anywhere near the same emotional level as the last one. It was still an above average read, but maybe I should have taken a break before reading it, considering how the last book left me a drained, emotionless husk of a human being. You can't get kicked in the feels when you haven't got any left.

It didn't help that at the first hint of there having been an investigation gone horribly wrong I immediately (and accurately) guessed what had happened (and to whom), and then I got frustrated that the book continued to dance around it with those disjointed bits of plot dropped here and there. And I also guessed the murderers right away. That hasn't bothered me in past Gamache novels, but this time I felt like it left me nothing else to do other than plod onward to the end and see if I was right. (I was.)

Still a good book, but for me the magical formula was a little off this time.

Sigh.