When you feel like the only one who hasn't read a particular book, you have one of two choices: you can choose to ignore it altogether in your happy little cave of one or you can pick up the book and see for yourself what all of the hype is about. Because I'm participating in a reading challenge for which one of the requirements was to read a cozy mystery and because I was one of the few stragglers who hadn't yet read anything by Louise Penny, I picked up her first book, Still Life.
From what I'd heard, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache would be a hard character to dislike. I found this to be absolutely true. There's something really endearing about him. He's not your usual hard-nosed macho cop. Far from it. He's actually a bit of a softy with a penchant for licorice pipes whose job just happens to be a professional crime solver.
Inspector Gamache finds himself called to the cozy village of Three Pines when well-liked, nothing-out-of-the-ordinary senior citizen Jane Neal turns up dead in the woods on Thanksgiving Sunday, apparently shot by an arrow. It's hunting season, so the possibility of her death being a genuine accident is great, but when someone turns up dead for no apparent reason, everyone connected to them suddenly becomes a suspect. What are the red herrings that incorporate themselves into everyday life and who is the actual murderer? All of sudden it looks as though everyone has something to gain and closets full of skeletons.
Still Life is the perfect title for this story, as Jane's life is literally still now, since she's deceased, but there was also an art competition taking place in the village just days before she turned up dead, so it also fits the the art reference. This is unfortunately one part of the story that brought things down a notch for me. I generally find - and this is only my personal opinion - that nine times out of ten when art is a component in novels, I just don't get it. I like art in real life, but because it's such a personal taste thing, what we like and don't like, I often just don't get the artworks in books and why the pieces garner the praise they do within them. That said, the art Jane did in the novel actually becomes much bigger than just the competition piece and that integral part of the plot made things really interesting. It was less about the style than the...well, hey, this is a mystery after all, so I can't give it away. I'll just say that the bigger artwork component managed to pull me back around.
I don't often read mystery books. Something about the genre is less appealing to me than regular fiction. I think it's that I find myself unable to settle comfortably into the stories, as I get wholly fixated on trying to figure who did the crime. But something that made this particular book stand out to me is that I have visited some of the real-life townships that Three Pines is inspired by. Having seen the area in person allowed me to have true-to-life visuals of some of the fictional places and the atmosphere in this book, which made it extra engaging. Let me just say that Louise Penny is stamped all over these townships: her readings sell out and there are references to the author and her books all over the place. Now I know what all of the fuss is about. And now that I finally picked up a book by Louise Penny, I'm grateful to no longer be on the outside looking in.
Judge the cover: 3/5
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