Ruth Zardo

Ruth Zardo is the acerbic, celebrated poet living in Three Pines in Louise Penny's Three Pines mystery series — a woman of advanced age, formidable reputation, and deliberately abrasive social manner who lives in the village with her duck Rosa and who is more observant and more emotionally intelligent than her determined unpleasantness suggests. Her relationship with Chief Inspector Gamache is one of the series' ongoing sources of both comedy and genuine warmth.

Penny writes Ruth as a specific type of difficult old woman — the kind whose roughness is a form of honesty, whose refusal of social niceties is connected to her poet's commitment to truth, and whose capacity for love is real even when her capacity for tact is absent. Ruth has seen enough of life that she has decided to spend what remains of it not pretending.

Ruth's poetry, which appears in fragments throughout the series, is some of the most moving writing in the books — Penny has given her an authentic poet's voice that is distinct from the narrative prose and that reveals dimensions of Ruth's inner life that her behaviour carefully conceals from most people around her.

Begin the Three Pines series with Still Life (2005).