The head of the homicide department of the Quebec police, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache (Alfred Molina) arrives in the snowy village of Three Pines to investigate the death of a woman, a local socialite, Cecy de Poitiers, who killed right during the traditional curling match. Gamache was sent here as if in punishment for the excessive compassion shown towards the family of the missing girl (the police are accused of criminal inaction). However, he still approaches the matter with all responsibility: whether it is a link or not, the culprit must be found. Soon, almost all the few residents of Three Pines are under suspicion: everyone had their own reason to hate Sisi.

a quiet evening for a detective series, and it seems that Three Pines does not pretend to be more, let them not joke here: the writer Louise Penny, based on whose novels the series was filmed, became the winner of the Agatha Christie Award five times (this is a record), and her inspector Gamache was given the title of “Canadian Poirot”. Penny’s recipe is terribly simple, but no less effective: according to her, she described the village in which she herself would like to live, with the inhabitants with whom she herself would like to be friends, and the main character came up with the one she herself would like to marry (Actually, the main prototype was not Poirot, but her husband).

There are already 18 books in the Gamache cycle, not counting the thriller State of Terror, co-authored with one of the main fans Penny – Hillary Clinton (where the inspector is limited to a small cameo). For a single village near the border with the United States, of course, there are a lot of corpses, but who cares: the main thing is that Gamache does not sit idle (otherwise all this joy would not fall with such regularity on The New York Times bestseller list).

The first season of the show seems to be aimed at even greater simplicity and accessibility: the last two episodes, for example, adapt the story “The Executioner”, not included in the main series and generally written for practical purposes – to help learners of English. Because of this, “Three Pines” loses some refinement, which, perhaps, would not be superfluous in the conditions of not the most outstanding detective itself, but is absent for reasons that are not entirely clear: the creator of the series, Emilia di Girolamo, one must think, is not in vain in at one time she served as showrunner for the third season of The Tunnel, the British-French version of the Danish-Swedish Bridge. the elderly good-natured, but terribly insightful investigator sits like a glove. Yes, and the Three-Pines charm, it seems, was transferred to the screen with sufficient care: willy-nilly, you begin to envy Gamache, who retired in the middle of the book cycle and settled in this tiny village where owls are not what they seem, but at the same time, and exactly what they seem, and even has its own Lady with a log – Grandmother with a goose.