It was rather like the exit of a bumble bee and left a noticeable silence behind it.” A blurb (or a review, I forget which) compares her to Agatha Christie, which I suppose could be true, only it's a version of Christie that was being paid by the word and operates only inside people's heads, which really isn't Christie at all.Ĭonsider Christie's brief character description from Crooked House about Uncle Roger, an emotional gentle giant: “He collided with a screen, said ‘I beg your pardon’ to it in a flustered manner, and went out of the room. Maybe it's the recent time change (is there any point to Daylight Savings Time anymore?), maybe it's the fact that I feel like I'm swimming uphill in my nursing clinical trying to get hours in, but Still Life kept putting me to sleep. Middling books are the hardest to review, dontchathink? Just the sort of book I needed during these turbulent times! I will definitely be checking out other volumes in this series. Despite being about murder, the book is infused with a sense of kindness and a faith in humanity that is quite refreshing and even healing. You get the usual good twists, turns and red herrings of a proper mystery, and along the way you get to know the inhabitants of the town so well you will be tempted to find the place, check into the B&B, and spend a few days enjoying the apple cider, licorice pipes, and fall colors. When a local artist is found dead on a deer trail, pierced through the chest by a hunting arrow, Gamache and his homicide team are dispatched from Montreal to solve the case. The setting is Three Pines, a small Quebecois village near the U.S. As Chief Inspector Gamache puts it at one point in the book (paraphrasing): 'It was a town full of lovely people. Still Life certainty falls within that framework, but what makes it stand out is its strong sense of place (Quebec), third person omniscient narration (we know what most of the characters are thinking most of the time) and its lovingly crafted portraits of life in a small town.Īll of Penny's characters are sympathetic, or at least understandable, even the most unlikable.

It's been so long since I've read a mystery of the 'cozy' variety I'm not sure the sub-genre is even called that anymore? At any rate, I usually think of cozies as gentler in spirit than the rock 'em, sock 'em hardboiled noir mysteries, often set a small town or rural setting, with little to no violence on stage, and most of the plot centering on the puzzle of whodunnit.

Still life by louise penny