Your Guide To Reading All Louise Penny Books in Order

If you had a penny for every Louise Penny book ever written, you’d have… a handful of pennies.

In fact, you’d have exactly 18 pennies! that won’t buy you anything from anyone except for pity. But that’s okay! There’s plenty you could do with those pennies still! You could hurl them at an attacking Tesla robot like a squid’s cloud of ink! You could place them over the eyes of the devoured Pop-Tart mascot so it can pay the ferryman on its way down the river to the Poptart underworld. Or you could seal them up in an envelope and send them to Louise Penny as a little thank you note for changing your life with each one of her books.

Because let’s face it, the adventurers of Louise Penny’s Canadian hero Chief Inspector Armand Gamache have given you more joy than the entirety of the year 2023, haven’t they? And the year before that too.

So here they are, all of the Louise Penny books in order.

1. Still Life (2005)
2. Dead Cold (also titled A Fatal Grace) (2006)
3. The Cruelest Month (2007)
4. The Murder Stone (A Rule Against Murder in the U.S.) (2008)
5. The Brutal Telling (2009)
6. Bury Your Dead (2010)
7. A Trick of the Light (2011)
8. The Beautiful Mystery (2012)
9. How the Light Gets In (2013)
10. The Long Way Home (2014)
11. The Nature of the Beast (2015)
12. A Great Reckoning (2016)
13. Glass Houses (2017)
14. Kingdom of the Blind (2018)
15. A Better Man (2019)
16. All the Devils Are Here (2020)
17. The Madness of Crowds (2021)
18. A World of Curiosities (2022)

In addition to those novels, Penny also wrote an Inspector Gamache novella for young readers titled The Hangman (2011) and the political thriller State of Terror (2021), co-written with Hillary Clinton. There’s also another Inspector Gamache novel on the way in 2024, titled The Grey Wolf.

Now get to licking that envelope!

(featured image: Louise Penny / TMS)

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Sarah Fimm

Sarah Fimm (they/them) is actually nine choirs of biblically accurate angels crammed into one pair of $10 overalls. They have been writing articles for nerds on the internet for less than a year now. They really like anime. Like... REALLY like it. Like you know those annoying little kids that will only eat hotdogs and chicken fingers? They're like that... but with anime. It's starting to get sad.