Wow, pink? “You have this confined space, this small village, and you get to know the characters – and they are characters – and learn the layout of Three Pines. I see it with traces of white paint, clinging uselessly amidst overgrown shrubbery and trees. But in the second book it’s CC’s house. I saw a somber red brick Victorian, somewhat like that pictured on the cover of one of the books. Her novels have been published in 23 languages. Last summer, with the support of the Crime Writers of Canada and a $1,000 cash prize donated by McArthur & Company, Penny helped launch the first Unhanged Arthur for Best Unpublished First Novel. Whitehead, who recently retired as head of hematology at the Montreal Children’s Hospital, encouraged Penny to write, and now Penny is returning the favour. Pink! Not nearly as intimidating—it’s pink!—as Louise makes it out to be, the Old Mansion House serves as the inspiration for the old Hadley House in A Fatal Grace. Sort of like the sci-fi horror films where the same characters keep coming face to face with the monster, even though it’s supposed to be ravaging the whole earth. But this is quite charming. However, she still has a knack for killing off her characters with cold-blooded panache. The Cruellest Month is due out in the U.S. in March, and Penny’s signed a new contract with her American publisher, St. Martin’s Press, for three further mysteries. The Annotated Three Pines – A Fatal Grace. Or, in the Chief Inspector’s case, all of Quebec. “It wasn’t about what people did. The Spa and the one-room (I think) cabin in the woods where the hermit lived. “I’d made a contract with myself as a child, and that was just ‘write a book,’” Penny says. Read 4 152 reviews from the world's largest community f… “It was devastating,” Penny confides. Very nice. Last August, Penny was in New York, strategizing with her publisher. From the ages of 21 to 35, Penny was an alcoholic. Your email address will not be published. “I relaxed when I realized I wanted to write a mystery,” she says, “because it’s a structure I understand, and it allows me to explore everything I need.”. It also stood on a rise, with a crooked stone walkway winding up to the front steps. So far, she’s dispatched one with an arrow through the heart (Still Life); another in an electrified lawn chair (Dead Cold); and her latest corpse, in The Cruellest Month, is frightened to death during a seance. The Brutal Telling book. I did not “see” the large expanse of lawn. But wait, when are we going to find out where we can go to eat Olivier and Gabri’s fabulous meals? It's 400 years old and specializes in rare and medicinal plants, picked up by explorers from all over the world. (The covers of her U.S. editions now bear the label “A Three Pines Mystery.”) “It’s what is typically called ‘a cozy,’” says McArthur & Company owner Kim McArthur. All content copyright Quill & Quire — Quill & Quire is a registered trademark of St. Joseph Media. Love your characters, even the poet. According to her St. Martin’s editor, Hope Dellon, opportunity is knocking: “Everyone in the world should be reading Louise’s books.”, Life wasn’t always this blessed, which may be why the 49-year-old Penny sometimes looks as though she’s trying to refrain from pinching herself. She finished second out of 800 entries and immediately landed a British agent; the book was published in 2005. Penny writes her mysteries the way her hero, Gamache, solves them – by collecting emotions. “Well, I wasn’t just working with her. I had imagined it as dark grey surrounded by trees. Whitehead is working on a book about his medical career; they share an office and write at side-by-side desks. In my mind, it used to be white, with dark green shutters, but now it’s a dingy gray (at least until it gets “rehabilitated” in the later books), covered in grime and neglect, completely overgrown with vines and vegetation. Penny is happily married, lives in Sutton, a bucolic village in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, and is doing what she always wanted to – writing novels. Instead, she was watching a lot of Oprah and eating a lot of gummy bears. “Louise’s books are police procedurals with a very British flavour,” she says, “but they also have nasty murders and fascinating, complicated characters.”, Indeed, Penny is a darker writer than it appears at first glance – a darkness especially evident in The Cruellest Month.