A review by nikkissaw
The Madness of Crowds by Louise Penny

3.0

I love all the Gamache series books and highly recommend them to everyone. The only one I didn’t love was The Long Way Home. I was so excited to read this book because it has been about a year since I finished the series. It started off strong, with an excellent, twisty mystery but a little over halfway through it became redundant. And honestly there were pieces to the mystery I felt they were missing, while focusing on other possibly insignificant facts. I don’t think I’ve read one of these books and felt that I saw the missing pieces before the inspector did. It felt as though they kept talking about and guessing at the same theories over and over and over and THEN! What pushed me over the edge was they don’t even solve the crime at the end! I loathe books that don’t have a final conclusion- that leave you to wonder. Penny is usually very good about closing out her stories, I don’t know what happened with this one. Although I didn’t loathe this book I was disappointed at the conclusion.
The other thing I didn’t like was how it was wrapped around the pandemic. It wasn’t a huge part of the story but it was included and let’s be honest, having lived it the past 2+ years it is really the last thing I want to read or hear about.
If she writes another I’ll definitely read it, I’ll read them all until she closes out the series.
And when the heck is this going to make it to TV? Would be a good long lasting series IMO.