Sure enough, when Gamache asks, Ruth says, “…FINE stands for Fucked up, Insecure, Neurotic and Egotistical. Much later in the book, the wife of Chief Inspector Armand Gamache from the Surete headquarters in Montreal, says that the letters FINE in the title of the book of poetry must be an acronym for something. When you came inside flushed with the sun, Ruth writes bristly poems that well from some vast source of pain. It is Christmas time and the gay man who owns the village bistro, whom Ruth calls “fag,” says Ruth will portray Father Christmas because she does not have to grow a special beard. The villagers give as good as they get from Ruth. Ruth is also a natural leader: she is chief of Three Pines’ volunteer fire department, skills which become needed later in the book. She signs the book of a villager with the inscription: You Stink. She is seventy something, she drinks, often from someone else’s glass, and she swears like a trucker. In the second of the series, A Fatal Grace, Ruth has just published a book of poetry called, I’m FINE, and some village members go to a book signing at Ogilvy’s department store in Montreal. Ruth Zardo is a poet from Three Pines, a village in Quebec Province, Canada, the fictional creation of Louise Penny, who writes a mystery series set in Three Pines.
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