A Trick of the Light

A Trick of the Light is a mystery novel by the Canadian writer Louise Penny, published in 2011. It is the seventh book featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surete du Quebec, and it won the Anthony Award for Best Novel.

The story turns on an art exhibition. Clara Morrow has her first solo show at the modern art museum in Montreal, with a private view the evening before it opens and a party at her house in Three Pines afterwards. In the morning her husband Peter and a neighbour, out collecting the newspapers and the reviews, find a woman in party clothes lying dead in the back garden.

Nobody recognises her, and nobody remembers seeing her at either event, which means the guest list is long and the useful witnesses are few. She turns out to be Lillian Dyson, a painter Clara knew at art college more than twenty years earlier and a friend who ended the friendship badly, and her appearance has changed enough that Clara does not know her at first. Gamache's investigation has to work through the art world, where what people say about one another is worth money.