There are many celebrated contemporary novelists whose work I have never read. Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Stephen King, Michael Chabon, to name only a few. These omissions don’t bother me much. I’ll get to them eventually or I won’t. In other words, knowing they’re out there, famous and unread (by me), isn’t enough in itself to make me read their books. If, however, I learn about a well regarded novelist I’ve never even heard of before, I feel flashes of curiosity and irritation about my own ignorance that are strong enough to push me to the bookshop. That happened recently when I saw a profile in the FT of Mary Gaitskill. My local bookseller, who’s usually too well-mannered to show her disapproval about the gaps in my reading experience, was nevertheless surprised and suggested I start with the short story collection that launched Gaitskill’s career in the late 1980s called Bad Behavior.

Having now read these nine stories, I can better understand why Gaitskill’s reputation is so high and why her distinct and unusual style is so celebrated. The cast of characters here is uniformly unattractive and occasionally loathsome – cruel, narcissistic, exploitative, and deluded. But, unappealing as these people are, there’s a slice of life captured in these strange, cinematic stories, that feels vivid and authentic. I can’t recall reading in recent years anything about human relationships quite so relentlessly bleak as this collection, but it’s a testimony to Gaitskill’s talent that each of these small vignettes of unhappiness and solitude is made so compelling and memorable.

What’s going on here? That was the question I kept asking myself as I read the first few chapters of Snow. Why is a writer as sophisticated and as clever as John Banville pulling me into what seems like a classic Agatha Christie-style murder mystery? A Catholic priest is killed in a grand but faded country house, his mutilated body placed carefully in the library. Who’s the murderer? The old soldier who owns the house, his nervous wife, her shifty brother, the stable boy, the local doctor? Only very gradually did it occur to me that it was the very familiarity of this archaic, slightly stale genre, with its precise rules and restrictions, that Banville wanted as his setting for a theme altogether more ambitious: the horrors of clerical abuse and the subtle divisions in Irish society perpetrated by religion and social class.

In the harsh winter of 1957, Inspector Strafford is sent from Dublin to rural Wexford to investigate the brutal murder of Father Lawless. The crime is perpetrated in a house belonging to a member of the Protestant gentry, a milieu very familiar to Strafford, himself a Protestant. In a country and at a time in which the Catholic church has immense influence, Strafford is expected to uncover and conceal, to solve the crime but also to bury its most salacious circumstances.

Snow is a powerful novel but not an entirely satisfying story. Banville interrupts the action with an “interlude” narrated by the victim, a device that somewhat clumsily reveals the motive for the murder without divulging the identity of the killer. Although Strafford solves the crime, he does so without exercising much skill. Snow offers little to hardcore fans of mystery fiction, but I doubt that will bother Banville much. The decades of abuse perpetrated by priests and its systematic cover-up by an all-powerful Church – those are the crimes he wants us to remember.

Only my second in the lengthy Gamache series by Louise Penny and I fear the charm is wearing off. How many killings can the small village of Three Pines really bear? More importantly, how much of this slightly irksome cast of characters can I bear? The gratuitously rude old poet, the bitchy bistro owners, and the rest of the gang were charming enough in the first installment, but it all seems just a little too twee on the second outing.

To Penny’s credit Gamache and his team of investigators continue to intrigue and Gamache himself is undeniably a clever creation. I doubt if that’s enough to sustain a series of this length, but plenty of other readers seem to disagree if the sales figures are to be believed. The problem with A Fatal Grace is a simple one. The central plot is dull and far-fetched, and I found myself unable to care about the outcome. No amount of cozy characters and Canadian charm can make up for that.