The Long Way Home

I think this is a 3-star review because I listened to the novel and the narrator's voice is quite pleasing and fits with my internal image of Gamache. Otherwise I would likely downgrade this for both writerly reasons AND for OMG seriously that is your plot? reasons.
I'm not a huge Penny fan, but dip into her novels when there is nothing else available at the library for me to listen to on dog walks–which means I like her well enough. Or maybe I just like her characters, who seem like real people–or at least as real as people in genre fiction mysteries can feel.
When Penny tries to get literary, though, when she wants to point out to her readers a theme or a thread or a device, she hammers us over the head with it in the most unsubtle fashion. Those moments really bum me out, because they seem to indicate that either Penny wants to write more literary stuff and is held back by talent or by commercial concerns, OR that someone wants her to do this and the thematic stuff gets inserted into her pleasant narrative with no feel for the rest of the text.