Review: "Still Life" by Louise Penny

Quick Summary

Type: Novel, book 1 in the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series

Genre: Mystery, crime, thriller

Back Cover: "The discovery of a dead body in the woods on Thanksgiving Weekend brings Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his colleagues from the Sureté du Quebec to a small village in the Eastern Townships. Gamache cannot understand why anyone would want to deliberately kill well-loved artist Jane Neal, especially any of the residents of Three Pines - a place so free from crime it doesn't even have its own police force.

But Gamache knows that evil is lurking somewhere behind the white picket fences and that, if he watches closely enough, Three Pines will start to give up its dark secrets..."

Read Time: 3 days

Rating: 4 stars

Review

I started this series because I watched the adaptation on Amazon Prime with Alfred Molina (totally recommend it, although apparently it strays quite a bit from the original novels) and then my mother kept talking about this great series of murder mysteries she was reading, and when comparing notes we realized we were talking (more or less) about the same stories. So, I had her watch the TV show, and I started reading the books.

Anyway, I really enjoyed this story. I thought the relationships between the friend group (Jane Neal's friends, although I know them as the book club from the show) were extremely well written, and every character had a distinct personality.

The murder mystery itself was nothing special, but really where this story stood out was in the character relationships. Because those relationships were so compelling, I was more than happy to take a (mostly) low stakes mystery with not much action.