Still Life by Louise Penny
My rating: 4 of 5 stars An Excellent Mystery with an Unfortunate Climax Who’d kill anyone in Three Pines? It’s an idyllic village in Quebec, a quiet place that doesn't appear on tourist maps (it can almost only be found "unexpectedly" like Narnia), a place where nobody locks their doors (except to prevent neighbors from leaving excess zucchini), where there may be a little marijuana but no violent crime or police force, where an annual touch football game is played on the village green, where poets and artists and ex-psychologists engage in witty and affectionate conversation, and where a plucky gay couple run a popular bistro slash antique shop slash B&B while bantering like Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward. And especially who'd kill 76-year-old Jane Neal, a retired teacher who seems to have been universally liked (and loved) in Three Pines? It must've been a hunting accident! But most hunting accidents involve guns, while Jane was shot through the chest with an arrow, which is missing. And once Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Quebec Surete shows up with his homicide investigation team (including Jean Guy Beauvoir, his second in command of ten plus years, and Yvette Nichol, a rookie desperate to fulfill the dreams of her family and to impress Gamache), they start asking questions and poking around, and suspects surface. . . In Still Life (2005), her first Inspector Gamache novel, Louise Penny doesn't cheat or trick her readers. She hints at the identity of the killer unobtrusively but fairly. (I kinda started suspecting the person based on little signs about a quarter of the way into the novel, but kind of forgot about it or changed my mind here and there as the plot progressed.) She effectively sometimes uses Three Pines locals to provide us a bit of intel before the police get it, so we feel suspense as to whether Gamache will get it in time. As in the best mysteries, Penny's characters talk and think and act like real, interesting, and sympathetic people. Penny understands a wide range of human personalities and behaviors. She tells her story from the third person points of view of multiple characters: police like Gamache, Beauvoir, Nichol and locals like artist Clara Morrow, Jane's former student Matthew Croft, and bookshop owner Myrna Landers (the only black woman in town). It irritates me no end when mystery authors narrate stories from the points of view of culprits who never think about their crimes, unfairly throwing us off their scents… Penny I think avoids this slimy ploy. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is an appealing detective character to follow. A big man in his mid-fifties, bilingual in perfect French and English, well read (given to quoting from the Bible, Virginia Woolf, and Abbie Hoffman), observant, and full of empathy and sympathy. Unlike many fictional detectives, he is happily married and untroubled by inner demons or hidden skeletons. He wants the members of his homicide team to collaborate rather than compete, which, along with the fact that he's shocked by death (from a mouse caught in a trap to human shot in the woods), has led to the stalling of his career. His advancement has been hindered by his "fatal flaw" of helping people who don't deserve it and by his habit of stubbornly sticking to his instincts and principles to the point of insubordination. Refreshingly, he's fallible, as with the Arnot case, alluded to without explanation (one of Penny's techniques for making her characters feel like real people with their own present-affecting pasts). Nichol is another interesting character, because she runs so against the genre stream of earnest female rookie homicide investigators who appreciate the greatness of their male police officer mentor and eventually (despite early hiccups) build a mutually trusting, affectionate, and effective relationship. Instead, Nichol seems stubbornly unable to learn the investigative practices and life wisdom Gamache is teaching. She is manipulative, prickly, resentful, and smug. The kind of person who, after looking in a mirror at a sticker saying, "You're looking at the problem," searches the room behind her for answers. She disobeys orders, lies, screws up, blames other people, and acts abrasively superior when she (thinks she) does something right. How long Gamache will put up with her? There is plenty of interesting Quebecois culture in the novel: Thanksgiving in October, "tabernak" (tabernacle) as a strong swear word, cultural contrast if not conflict between Francophones and Anglophones, the dangers of hunting season for more than the prey. It is refreshing to read a mystery set in Canada instead of America. Lots of neat motifs woven in: still life (= arrested development, blaming others for your problems, waiting for others to solve your problem, etc.), long house (we enter it when we're born, leave it when we die), memory, etc. There is also plenty of neat literary stuff: like Gamache's quotations and references by other characters to Diogenes, Auden, etc. Lots of neat lines: "In the country death comes uninvited." "He was always delighted when a digital clock had all the same numbers." "Either that wallpaper goes or I go." (Oscar Wilde's last sentence, opportunely quoted in the novel) The audiobook reader, Ralph Cosham, is always understated and fine; nothing fancy or dramatic, just spot on, intelligent, understanding reading with perfect timing, pausing, pacing, emphasizing, etc. Unfortunately, the climax action is over the top given the rest of the novel and, to me, almost absurd and almost certainly unnecessary. "Please Penny," I pled after finishing the book, "you could get to the same moving resolution you end with without trying too hard to write an exciting climax with a bunch of people running around on a stormy night like keystone cops." Nevertheless, Still Life is as well done as a murder mystery can be, and quite funny and moving. If you like quietly and powerfully literate mysteries involving real fictional people, you'd probably like it. View all my reviews
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