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When Three Pines dropped on Amazon Prime in December 2022, viewers got hit with a shocking opener. Right there in the snowy quiet, a wealthy socialite named CC de Poitiers was brutally (and publicly) murdered. The kind of person even her family struggled to tolerate, CC had enemies everywhere.
Her death came during a Boxing Day curling match, electrocuted in what seemed like the perfect crime, staged right out in the open.
Alfred Molina’s Chief Inspector Armand Gamache swooped in and uncovered many suspects. Everyone had a reason to want her gone.
But the truth? It wasn’t a bitter neighbor or a business rival. It was (Spoiler alert) her own teenage daughter, Crie, who killed CC in Three Pines! Years of pain and humiliation at her mother’s hands finally boiled over into violence.
CC’s death in Three Pines
CC’s death was a headline that felt like a reckoning.
She lived in a repurposed residential school, a building soaked in Canada’s painful history with Indigenous communities.
Those walls saw cruelty before, and now held how she mocked her husband, tore down her daughter in public, and acted like rules didn’t touch her.
Gamache cracked the case, sure, but the real insight was quieter. We saw how silence lets rot set in with years of abuse, betrayal, and neglecting pain. Fans still talk about that betrayal. It is not just CC’s cruelty to Crie, but also her husband standing by, watching it happen, and doing nothing.
Crie had no one. No protector, no guide, no way out. Just damage piling up.
The murder hits hard because it’s about generational trauma. Pain is passed down like an heirloom here, and the grown-ups who see it but turn away.
Their silence is its own crime.
Crie was the killer fans can’t stop debating!
Crie’s reveal as the killer split readers and viewers of Three Pines. Some saw it coming, feeling Crie’s parents had damaged her too deeply. Others were troubled by how the book described Crie’s weight in rather fatphobic terms and wondered if author Louise Penny would write those parts differently now.
Many saw Crie as a victim of her own upbringing. Her size, they argued, wasn’t just about cruelty. It showed her pain and isolation. How she dressed in all the wrong clothes for the season made it sadder. Her crime felt like the last, desperate act of someone broken by years of neglect and mockery.
The story got under people’s skin. Crie was not a typical villain, but the only flaw in CC’s perfect world. She was the one thing the latter couldn’t control.
Why did this case set the tone for Three Pines?
The murder of CC sets the tone for what Three Pines will become. Forget tidy whodunits as this series dove headfirst into human truths.
Louise Penny's stories feel less like separate mysteries and more like one big, sprawling novel. They're all about the characters and stacked with moral gray areas. Take how Chief Inspector Gamache dealt with Crie's guilt. That showed viewers that this wasn't only about finding killers. We saw the hurt people carry inside and how towns either come together or fall apart.
CC's death was a plot starter that became the show's blueprint: secrets have consequences, and cruelty always leaves a scar.
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Watch Three Pines on Prime Video.
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