This only lasts for a couple of chapters, however, before he's back to a French accent again. He makes the most basic mistake in giving Inspector Gamache a French accent for the first couple of chapters, then as he reads another character describing Gamache's British accent he changes it accordingly. Sadly, Adam Sims does not appear to have read the books before narrating them and therefore has no understanding of the characters. What didn’t you like about Adam Sims’s performance? Penny's characters are fully grown, complex adults and during the course of the series one becomes very attached to them.

What I love about the characters is their wholeness - no-one is completely good or nice, no-one is completely awful or spiteful. Obviously Gamache, so fascinating! Ruth Zardo is also compelling. It is much darker and more profound than that.

Despite the village setting, however, this is not a 'cosy' crime series. The village of Three Pines is a character in itself, the villagers who live there are 3 dimensional, engaging and flawed - being believably human. This is the first in a wonderful series of books which I would recommend wholeheartedly to anyone. I think it’s the kindness that shines from him that I feel makes him right for Gamache.Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not? Still, we can’t order up a “young David Suchet. When he was in his early 50s I thought he’d be an ideal Gamache – he does a really convincing French accent as Hercule Poirot and, because he’s English, has a good English accent that Gamache has when he speaks English. I thought that Nathaniel Parker was closer to the right look for Gamache, though my favorite idea of who should play him has always been David Suchet – though he is too old now. Jean-Guy must mature and settle down somewhat, Gamache must have twinges of pain, a tremor of the hand, something that keeps alive the fact that he’s living with his failures, and the toll they take. So – they have to “almost” not age, but there are some things that aging does that must be included. And she talked about the fact that all the characters had to age in the series, but that she wanted to take it very slowly, because she couldn’t envision a dottering old man as her hero, and she didn’t want to pass the baton to a younger person – either Jean-Guy or Isabelle. I have also heard her say that she wrote Gamache to be someone she could love, because she had read somewhere that Agatha Christie had remarked that she couldn’t stand Hercule Poirot anymore. I think somewhere in the series, Louise refers to him as being in his mid-fifties.

Still life gamache