A Fatal Grace

Jean-Guy Beauvoir is Gamache’s second-in-command. He’s young, good-looking, and dresses well. While Gamache likes to dig into the darkness of the criminal mind, Beauvoir prefers to skim the surface. He’s superficial and constantly worries about his image. 

Robert Lemieux is the police officer assigned to guide Gamache through the preliminaries of CC’s murder case. He’s young and eager to impress. Lemieux is delighted when Gamache asks him to remain as part of the investigation team. 

Yvette Nichol is a junior detective with emotional problems. She created difficulties for the investigative team on a previous case, and now no one trusts her. Headquarters assigned her to the murder case in Three Pines to collect incriminating information about Gamache.  

Everyone who knows CC de Poitiers detests her. She bullies her husband and child and condescends to the villagers of Three Pines. CC has written a book entitled Be Calm and is anything but calm. At the beginning of the narrative, she is focused on her ambition to launch a new product line called Li Bien. When she is murdered, no one in Three Pines expresses remorse.

CC is 48 and blond. Her lover, Saul Petrov, who at once desires and abhors her, describes her this way: “Touching her was like caressing a veneer of ice. There was a beauty to it, and a frailty he found attractive. But there was also danger. If she ever broke, if she shattered, she’d tear him to pieces” (2).

As the story progresses, the pain and insecurity underneath CC’s fierceness become clear. She has fabricated a royal lineage for herself, replacing her real mother, a mentally unstable beggar, with a queen. When that fiction threatens to crumble, CC acts viciously to preserve it. Where at first she figuratively erases her mother, she next literally erases her by killing her. Ironically, CC is later killed by her own daughter.

Crie is CC’s 14-year-old daughter. Because she’s obese and often silent, she’s an embarrassment to her mother: “Those rolls of fat, those dreadful dimples, the underwear disappearing into the flesh. The face so frozen and staring” (9).

Crie has suffered a lifetime of verbal abuse and criticism from her mother. When the girl showcases her beautiful singing voice at a town event, her mother publicly berates her for it. Crie snaps and kills CC by electrocuting her, thus perpetuating a pattern of emotional turmoil and matricide among the women in her family.

Crie is a victim figure in the story, a character around whom El’s friends (who know Crie is El’s granddaughter and CC’s daughter) unite. The Three Graces feel remorse over El, who they lost to mental illness, and guilt for not protecting Crie from CC’s wrath. When they witness Crie in the act of murdering her mother, they decide, finally, to act on her behalf. They falsely confess to CC’s murder and attempt to take the secret to their graves.

Richard Lyon is CC’s husband. He’s heavy, soft-spoken, self-censoring, and nondescript. Lyon never stands up to his wife and never intervenes when she verbally abuses their daughter. For a while, Gamache considers Lyon the prime suspect for CC’s murder.

Saul Petrov is a 52-year-old photographer who’s having an affair with CC. She hired him to take photographs for her book cover and her Li Bien catalog. Saul dislikes CC intensely. He’s impressed with a portfolio of Clara’s work but never gets the chance to tell her so. Saul died in a fire that he set while destroying photographic evidence of CC’s murder.

Eleanor Allaire is the real name of the beggar known throughout the narrative as either Elle, L ,or El. She was the childhood friend of the Three Graces (Em, Kaye, and Mother Bea) and is CC’s mother. El is mentally disturbed and was institutionalized when CC was only 10 years old. She identifies herself as Eleanor of Aquitaine and wears a pendant bearing the queen’s screaming eagle emblem. She is also the artist who created the Li Bien ball. She was murdered by CC.

Clara is a middle-aged woman who loves the picture-postcard atmosphere of Three Pines. Married to artist Peter Morrow, she’s a gifted artist in her own right. A year earlier, Clara was involved in solving a local murder with Inspector Gamache. He thinks very highly of her: “Clara saw what others couldn’t. Like that little boy in The Sixth Sense, but instead of seeing ghosts, Clara saw good. Which was itself pretty scary” (62).