• Home
  • About
  • Archives - Wading Through
  • Archives - The Craft Sea

Wading Through...

  • Home
  • About
  • Archives - Wading Through
  • Archives - The Craft Sea

Still Life by Louise Penny

still.jpg

Title: Still Life (Inspector Gamache #1)

Author: Louise Penny

Publisher: Minotaur Books 2008

Genre: Mysteries

Pages: 314

Rating: 3/5 stars

Reading Challenges: Unread Shelf; Modern Mrs. Darcy; Seasonal TBR

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surêté du Québec and his team of investigators are called in to the scene of a suspicious death in a rural village south of Montreal. Jane Neal, a local fixture in the tiny hamlet of Three Pines, just north of the U.S. border, has been found dead in the woods. The locals are certain it's a tragic hunting accident and nothing more, but Gamache smells something foul in these remote woods, and is soon certain that Jane Neal died at the hands of someone much more sinister than a careless bowhunter.
Still Life introduces not only an engaging series hero in Inspector Gamache, who commands his forces---and this series---with integrity and quiet courage, but also a winning and talented new writer of traditional mysteries in the person of Louise Penny.

Okay, don’t throw anything at me, but my overwhelming feeling about this book was boredom. I was thoroughly bored. Police procedurals/murder mysteries are really not my genre. I rarely find one that I love, but do find a whole lot more that I hate. This one I didn’t hate, but I certainly didn’t love. The actual murder itself was fairly pedestrian. The characters in Three Pines weren’t that interesting to me. I definitely did not get the urge to up and move there. Inspector Gamache was okay, but he’s not Poirot. My biggest complaint is the writing. The beginning chapters are a muddled mess narration wise. We begin hearing the inner workings of one character and suddenly Penny switches to another character with little to no warning. I seriously had to back up and reread paragraphs to caught the practically non-existent transitions. Also, the writing can be overly flowery and descriptive. So many unnecessary sections thrown in. I just got really really bored with it all. At this point, I’m not sure if I will be continuing the series…

Inspector Gamache

  • #1 Still Life

  • #2 A Fatal Grace

  • #3 The Cruelest Month

  • #4 A Rule Against Murder

  • #5 The Brutal Telling

  • #6 Bury Your Dead

  • #7 A Trick of the Light

  • #8 The Beautiful Mystery

  • #9 How the Light Gets In

  • #10 The Long Way Home

  • #11 The Nature of the Beast

  • #12 A Great Reckoning

  • #13 Glass Houses

  • #14 Kingdom of the Blind

  • #15 A Better Man

  • #16 All the Devils are Here

  • #17 The Madness of Crowds

Unread Shelf Project.jpg
Seasonal TBR.jpg
MMD Reading Challenge 2020.jpg
star-rating-remains-the-most-important-part-of-a-review-cad0047.cad0047.png

Next up on the TBR pile:

service model.jpg stolen.jpg lovesickness.jpg frankenstein.jpg jujutsu5.jpg jujutsu6.jpg jujutsu7.jpg alley.jpg deserter.jpg water moon.jpg liminal.jpg sensor.jpg tombs.jpg
tags: Louise Penny, Unread Shelf Project, Modern Mrs. Darcy, mystery, 3 stars, Spring TBR List
categories: Book Reviews
Wednesday 05.12.21
Posted by Tobe Buffenbarger
Newer / Older

Powered by Squarespace.