Still Life by Louise Penny

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS:

Print: © October 3, 2005; ISBN: 9780312352554; PUBLISHER: St. Martin’s Minotaur; PAGES: 312 Unabridged; (Info from Goodreads.com)
Digital: ©: May, 2019; eISBN: 978-1429967235; PUBLISHER: St. Martin’s Minotaur Edition; PAGES: 312; Unabridged (First published in Great Britain by Headline Book Publishing. Info from Kindle version borrowed through Libby app.)
*Audio: COPYRIGHT ©: 5 May 2014; PUBLISHER: Macmillan Audio; DURATION: 10 hours (approx.); Unabridged; (Info from Amazon.com)
Feature Film or tv: ©: 2013; PDM Entertainment and Attraction Images. Stars Nathaniel Parker.

SERIES: Chief Inspector Armand Gamache Mystery, Book 1

MAIN CHARACTERS: (Not comprehensive)
Armand Gamache – Chief Inspector of the Surete du Quebec (Montreal)
Reine-Marie Gamache – Armand’s spouse.
Jean Guy Beauvoir – 35 year old Inspector serving under Armand Gamache for the past 10 years.
Isabelle Lacoste – an agent under Gamache (seems to be the forensic specialist)
Jane Neal – Local spinster
Lucy – Jane’s dog
Yvette Nichol – Agent in training
Robert Lemieux – Duty officer with the Cowansville Surete
Benjamin (Ben) Hadley – Local Villager
Timmer Hadley – Local Villager, Benjamin’s mother
Daisy - Ben’s dog
Peter Morrow – Local Villager, spouse of Clara
Clara Morrow – Local Villager, spouse of Peter
Ruth Zardo – Local Villager with a bad attitude
Matt hew Croft – Local Villager, spouse of Suzanne
Suzanne Croft – Local Villager, spouse of Matthew
Philippe Croft – 14 year old son of Suzanne and Matthew
Yolande Fontaine – Local Villager, spouse of Andre Malenfant, niece of Jane Neal
Andre Malenfant – 37-year-old Local Villager, spouse of Yolande
Bernard Malenfant – 14-year-old son of Yolande and Andre
Olivier Brule – Local Bistro owner, spouse of Gabri
Gabriel (Gabri) Dubeau – Local Villager, spouse of Olivier
Myrna Landers – Local bookshop owner

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
SELECTED: My friend, Isa, mentioned that she’d heard this author is good. The same day I read her email, I found the first set of Louise Penny’s books at a used book sale. I got them for Isa, and downloaded the audio version of this first one.
Don and I had a few options for our next listen, so we started this one tentatively. Don lost interest. I figured it was because a slew of characters are introduced early on, taxing one’s memory to recall who is who.
When it came time, the next time we were in the car, to pull up an audiobook, Don suggested one of the others, rather than returning to this. In the meantime my lending period expired, and it was many months before I thought to check it out again and listen on my own.
ABOUT: A small quaint village peopled with many artists and archers, is regularly inundated by out-of-town dear - (dog, cow, horse, and people) shooting hunters, so when one of their own, a particularly kind and well-respected former teacher, meets with an untimely death due to what appears to be a hunting-mishap, the first assumption is that her death was an accident. But as the officials from Montreal investigate, suspicion grows that Jane was murdered.

OVERALL IMPRESSION: I haven’t had a favorite Canadian writer since Colleen McCullough! I’ve missed you, Canada! The characters are well developed, and form a great diverse cast, and I learned a few terms I hadn’t known before, such as “A friend of Dorothy’s.”

AUTHOR:
Louise Penny
From within the book:
“LOUISE PENNY is the author of the #1 New York Times and Globe and Mail bestselling series of Chief Inspector Armand Gamache novels. She has won numerous awards, including a CWA Dagger and the Agatha Award (six times), and was a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Novel. In 2017, she received the Order of Canada for her contributions to Canadian culture. Louise lives in a small village south of Montréal.”

Excerpt from Wikipedia:
“Louise Penny (born July 1, 1958) {Oh, look! Same year *I* was born!} [1] CM OQ is a Canadian author of mystery novels set in the Canadian province of Quebec centred on the work of francophone Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec. Penny's first career was as a radio broadcaster for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). After she turned to writing, she won numerous awards for her work, including the Agatha Award for best mystery novel of the year five times, including four consecutive years (2007–2010), and the Anthony Award for best novel of the year five times, including four consecutive years (2010–2013). Her novels have been published in 23 languages.
Penny was born in Toronto, Canada,[2] on July 1, 1958.[1][3] Her mother was an avid reader of both fiction and non-fiction, with a particular liking for crime fiction,[4] and Louise grew up reading mystery writers such as Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Michael Innes.[4]

Penny earned a Bachelor of Applied Arts (Radio and Television) from Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (now Toronto Metropolitan University) in 1979.[5] After graduation, aged 21, she embarked on an 18-year career as a radio host and journalist with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).[6]”

NARRATOR:
Ralph Cosham-
Excerpt from Wikipedia:
“Ralph Howard Cosham (25 February 1936 – 30 September 2014),[1] was a British-born American film, stage and voice actor and book narrator. Cosham also recorded under the name Geoffrey Howard.[2] He lived in Reston, Virginia. He was a member of the acting companies of the Washington Theatre Club, the Folger Shakespeare Library, Arena Stage and the Shakespeare Theater all in Washington, DC.[3] Cosham changed careers from British journalist to actor in the 1970s.[2] Several of his works were awarded "Audio Best of the Year" by Publishers Weekly.[2]

Ralph Cosham died of an illness on Tuesday, 30 September 2014 at his home in Reston, Virginia, at the age of 78.[4]

Career
In early 1964, Hamilton Company LTD contracted with United Press International to prepare a special souvenir magazine of The Beatles' first visit to America. UPI assigned English immigrant Cosham to write this. His interviews with concertgoers and reports were published as "The Beatles at Carnegie Hall," which remains easy to find today.

In voice acting he was featured in the video game The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion[5] as the Breton males, including characters such as Jauffre, the Grandmaster of the Blades, and Vicente Valtieri; Dr. Guervich in Death Without Consent (2005); he played the voice part "townspeople 3" in Pirates of the Caribbean (2003).[citation needed]

In acting he was a driver in Shadow Conspiracy (1997); Supreme Court Justice Jensen in The Pelican Brief (1993), Judge Assel Steward in Suspect (1987); a Marine Lieutenant in Starman (1984); and played the part of Braddock's Captain in the TV mini-series George Washington (1984).[6]

As a book narrator, Cosham (or as Howard) narrated over 100 books since 1992.[3][2] Some titles include The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, The Castle by Franz Kafka, The Secret Agent (1996), Heart of Darkness (2002), Frankenstein (2002), Around the World in Eighty Days (2003), Alice in Wonderland (2004), Watership Down (2010), Dead Man's Chest (2001 novel by Roger Johnson, narrated in 2006), King Leopold's Ghost, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, numerous works of C.S. Lewis including The Space Trilogy, Miracles, Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain and The Screwtape Letters, as well as a collection of American short stories titled The American Experience: A Collection of Great American Stories (2004). Cosham was the first narrator for a series of mysteries written by Louise Penny; he won AudioFile Earphones and Library Journal awards for best audiobook and the Mystery Audie Award in 2013 for The Beautiful Mystery. Cosham recorded the first ten books of the series.[3]

After Cosham's death, Robert Bathurst was chosen to narrate future books.[7]”

*Ohhh, that’s terrible news (Ralph passed in Sept. 2014)! I’ve always adored Ralph’s narrations! He passed just 4 months after this audio version of this book was released?! Poor Louise! (Authors must get somewhat attached to the readers, even if it’s the publishers that assign them, especially when they are as great as Ralph) I didn’t include it here, but see in the Wikipedia article that she also lost her husband, Michael Whitehead, just two years later, in 2016. Belated condolences!

GENRE:
Fiction; Canadian; Mystery

TIME FRAME:
N/A (But I’d say contemporary - 2005)

LOCATION(S):
Three Pines, Quebec (Canada)

SUBJECTS:
Art, LGBTQ; Psychology; Murder; Archery; Hunting; Painting; Art; Art competitions; Loss; Friendship

DEDICATION:
“This book is given, with all my heart, to Michael”

SAMPLE QUOTATION:
From Chapter “One”
“ Miss Jane Neal met her maker in the early morning mist of Thanksgiving Sunday. It was pretty much a surprise all round. Miss Neal’s was not a natural death, unless you’re of the belief everything happens as it’s supposed to. If so, for her seventy-six years Jane Neal had been walking toward this final moment when death met her in the brilliant maple woods on the verge of the village of Three Pines. She’d fallen spread-eagled, as though making angels in the bright and brittle leaves.
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Quebec knelt down; his knees cracking like the report of a hunter’s rifle, his large, expressive hands hovering over the tiny circle of blood marring her fluffy cardigan, as though like a magician he could remove the wound and restore the woman. But he could not. That wasn’t his gift. Fortunately for Gamache he had others. The scent of mothballs, his grandmother’s perfume, met him halfway. Jane’s gentle and kindly eyes stared as though surprised to see him.
He was surprised to see her. That was his little secret. Not that he’d ever seen her before. No. His little secret was that in his mid-fifties, at the height of a long and now apparently stalled career, violent death still surprised him. Which was odd, for the head of homicide, and perhaps one of the reasons he hadn’t progressed further in the cynical world of the Sûreté. Gamache always hoped maybe someone had gotten it wrong, and there was no dead body. But there was no mistaking the increasingly rigid Miss Neal. Straightening up with the help of Inspector Beauvoir, he buttoned his lined Burberry against the October chill and wondered. Jane Neal had also been late, but in a whole other sense, a few days earlier. She’d arranged to meet her dear friend and next-door neighbor Clara Morrow for coffee in the village bistro. Clara sat at the table by the window and waited. Patience was not her long suit. The mixture of cafe au lait and impatience was producing an exquisite vibration. Throbbing slightly, Clara stared out the mullioned window at the village green and the old homes and maple trees that circled the Commons. The trees, turning breathtaking shades of red and amber, were just about the only things that did change in this venerable village.
Framed by the mullions, she saw a pick-up truck drift down rue du Moulin into the village, a beautiful dappled doe draped languidly over its hood. Slowly the truck circled the Commons, halting villagers in mid-step. This was hunting season and hunting territory. But hunters like these were mostly from Montreal or other cities. They’d rent pickups and stalk the dirt roads at dawn and dusk like behemoths at feeding time, looking for deer. And when they spotted one they’d slither to a stop, step out of the truck and fire. Not all hunters were like that, Clara knew, but enough of them were. Those same hunters would strap the deer on to the hood of their truck and drive around the countryside believing the dead animal on the vehicle somehow announced that great men had done this.
Every year the hunters shot cows and horses and family pets and each other. And, unbelievably, they sometimes shot themselves, perhaps in a psychotic episode where they mistook themselves for dinner. It was a wise person who knew that some hunters – not all, but some – found it challenging to distinguish a pine from a partridge from a person.
Clara wondered what had become of Jane. She was rarely late, so she could easily be forgiven. Clara found it easy to forgive most things in most people. Too easy, her husband Peter often warned. But Clara had her own little secret. She didn’t really let go of everything. Most things, yes. But some she secretly held and hugged and would visit in moments when she needed to be comforted by the unkindness of others.
Croissant crumbs had tumbled on top of the Montreal Gazette left at her table Between flakes Clara scanned the headlines: ‘Parti Quebecois Vows to Hold Sovereignty Referendum’, ‘Drug Bust in Townships’, ‘Hikers Lost in Tremblant Park’.
Clara lifted her eyes from the morose headlines. She and Peter had long since stopped subscribing to the Montreal papers. Ignorance really was bliss. They preferred the local Williamsburg County News where they could read about Wayne’s cow, or Guylaine’s visiting grandchildren, or a quilt being auctioned for the seniors’ home. Every now and then Clara wondered if they were copping out, running away from reality and responsibility. Then she realised she didn’t care. Besides, she learned everything she really needed to survive right here at Olivier’s Bistro, in the heart of Three Pines.
‘You’re a million miles away,’ came the familiar and well-loved voice. There was Jane, out of breath and smiling, her laugh-lined face pink from the autumn chill and the brisk trot from her cottage across the village green.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ she whispered into Clara’s ear as the two hugged, one tiny, plump and breathless, the other thirty years younger, slim, and still vibrating from the caffeine high. ‘You’re trembling,’ said Jane, sitting down and ordering her own cafe au lait. ‘I didn’t know you cared so much.’ ”

RATING:.
5

STARTED READING – FINISHED READING
12/14/2023 – 12/16/2023 ( )

In a quaint, rural Quebec village, a much-loved elderly woman is discovered dead along a forest path. Hunting accident or murder? Chief Inspector Armand Gamache intends to find out.

I placed this first book in Penny's series on my TBR in early 2018 but wanted to finish up another mystery series before beginning this one. Six years later, here we are, and it was worth the wait. While I'm not a huge mystery buff, I've been making an effort to expand my reading horizons, and this was for sure a page-turner. Penny displays surprising skill for a first-time novelist, and this book is buzzing with potential for character development, world-building and expansion. Sometimes I read only the first book in a series to get a taste, but this is one I expect to continue. ( )

Pros: A decently complex mystery that convincingly leads investigators down a number of productive and unproductive paths; an excellent lead character (Gamache); a setting whose individual locations are vividly portrayed; a rather compassionate, people-positive worldview on the author's part. I can see why people like the books. They imply that the world is full of really nice people, plus a few baddies who only need to be found out and taken care of.

Cons: Prose. Even allowing for this being the author's first novel, the writing is poor. I suffered particularly from excessive point-of-view switching — three characters may share their internal monologues in the course of a single page, and the change is not always clearly signaled. Most often it's the viewpoint of the first character mentioned in the paragraph, but not always. I was particularly confused when one paragraph started off with Beauvoir closing a gate and continued with a mention of what Gamache was thinking, momentarily leading me to believe that Beauvoir was telepathic. I finally decided to roll with it and to try to figure it out from the context, while assuming that some of the value judgments were actually the author's. Pronouns were no help; "he" might refer to three different people in three successive mentions.

Do I sound like a persnickety grammarian? Maybe I do, but my point isn't the grammar, which is technically correct. It's that the writing style is ambiguous and vague where the author presumably intends it to be clear. This vagueness extends to the village of Three Pines. As I said, the locations are vivid, but the village as a whole never comes into focus. We're told there are four main streets radiating out from a center green. But we meet only about twelve or fifteen people, and three kids. Is this a village of 200? 1000? 10,000? Who can tell? (Five years ago I read the sixth book in the series, which was no clearer on this point.)

Many of the characters are one-note. The unsympathetic characters, in particular, seem to have no redeeming qualities at all, and it was grating to read about them and their petty, cartoonish thoughts. (In this novel, little is shown through a character's actions. Instead, interior thoughts serve as unceasing exposition, while the plot is driven largely through dialogue. Overall, I'd say there's a paragraph of inner musing for every line of dialogue.) Another character showed astonishing emotional intelligence in one scene, and then for the rest of the book was childish and cruel, which I could never reconcile. Maybe Penny intended to arouse the reader's suspicion of this character as a suspect.

When we do meet the murderer, we get the murder-speech in which he or she (no spoilers here!) describes all of the murder plans and justifications, past and present, while in the midst of trying to complete the fraught task of laying hold of and killing the latest victim. A fine multitasker.

I'll stick with Ross Macdonald. ( )

Perhaps I shouldn't have started with the first one. It seemed a logical place to start, the first book in a series, but, beginnings can be weak. I'd certainly throw this book up as evidence. The writing is amateurish, the logic often nonsensical, the characters stock and uninteresting, and the pace way too slow, given all that. So I will now amuse myself with the blockquote tag and some animated gifs.

Peter neatly unfolded first one corner of the paper then the other, smoothing the creases with his hand. Clara had no idea a rectangle had so many corners.

Clara got up and walked slowly to the work on the easel. It touched her deep down in a place of such sadness and loss it was all she could do not to weep. How could this be? she asked herself. The images were so childish, so simple. Silly almost, with dancing geese and smiling people. But there was something else. Something just beyond her grasp.

I'm an artist, have been all my life, and I couldn't do that. But there's more to it than that. There's a depth. Though I've been staring at it for more than an hour now and that shimmering thing hasn't happened again. Maybe I'm too needy. Maybe the magic only works when you're not looking for it.

"Focus, Beauvoir. Jane Neal was killed by a forty-year-old arrow. When was the last time you saw a biker with a bow and arrow?" It was a good point, and one Beauvoir hadn't thought of.

She leaned in closer and saw there was a sticker attached to the mirror. On it was written, 'You're looking at the problem.' Nichol immediately began searching the area behind her, the area reflected in the mirror, because the problem was there.

At past openings only the artists themselves and a few scraggly friends would show up, fortifying themselves with wine from boxes and cheese produced by a board member's goat.

Since the events of that horrible night he'd retreated completely on to his island. The bridge had been destroyed. The walls had been constructed. And now Peter was unapproachable, even by her. Physically, yes, she could hold his hand, hold his head, hold his body, and she did. But she knew she could no longer hold his heart.

( )

Crime