Still Life

It took a while for me to get into this because I've never read a “cosy” mystery set in a Canadian small village before, but it definitely grew on me before the halfway mark. I somewhat guessed the culprit and their motivation early on but wasn't confident of my guess until it was finally revealed - and it was pretty satisfying to get it right!

Gamache and Beauvoir were a pretty nice police duo. Gamache in particular managed to stand out from the bevy of cozy mystery police inspectors/detectives in a million mystery series out there primarily because he's “softer” than a lot of the others. Detectives in these kinda mysteries tend to be strait-laced and logical to a fault, sometimes to the point of sociopathy (see: Sherlock Holmes), but Gamache... isn't. He homes in on the human aspect of the crime, he immerses himself into the village life while still making it clear that the purpose of his presence is to investigate the crime. He's interested in humanity, psychology, and sociology, and actually talks positively about feelings, emotions, and intuitions, something that a lot of cozy mystery detectives would never touch with a ten foot pole.

I didn't enjoy the first few chapters tbh, where we open with Gamache being called to the crime scene, but then we suddenly go back in time to relive some events that happened before the crime was committed, but this was never explicitly denoted in the text. This does seem to be Penny's writing style of choice. Sometimes we're happily experiencing events in the POV of one character, who would then maybe look over at another character and suddenly we're reading the POV of this second character without it being explicitly stated that the POV switched. It threw me off a lot at the beginning but I got used to it, and thankfully this doesn't happen so often as to become annoying.

The village characters were all blending into one for me at first, and I found my engagement with the book dropping whenever it was all of them gathering at one spot. It got better eventually as the book went on and we found out more about each character to give them more of a distinct personality and identity. By the end of it, I came to appreciate some of the side characters who I was either completely indifferent to at first or even repulsed by.

A particular side character whom I just got increasingly frustrated and bewildered by as the book went on was Agent Yvette Nichol. Given that we actually spend a small bit of time in the book knowing about her backstory and family before she is thrown into the action with Gamache, I thought she might turn out to be a fairly important character in the process of solving the mystery. I thought I would be seeing a classic mentor-mentee relationship unfold between Gamache and her through the story. I was incredibly bewildered that neither of this turned out to be the case. In fact, her last few appearances in the book were so frustrating I kinda hope that she was just a one-off mistake and wouldn't come back in any of the other books. Spoilery thoughts on her and also on the ending: I thought she might actually grow from being an insufferable twit to becoming a bit more humbled and bit more wise by the end - but no, she was still an insufferable twit at the end. I thought she'd finally realise she was the problem when she saw her reflection in the window, but no, she put that blame on Gamache. That moment was the exact moment I gave up on her character. I also thought, OK, maybe she would turn out to be the insufferable twit who happened to have a stunning intellect that far outstripped everyone else's, even Gamache, because she seemed to have an idea of who the culprit was right from the start but was keeping it to herself. So when she finally said it was Peter Morrow, I believed her. But no, it turned out to be Ben, who was one of my first few suspects... So she's still an insufferable twit who is also WRONG. So what is the whole point of her in this story!?

Overall, I was happy with the experience of reading this book and it did give me some pretty nice quotes to think about, especially when Gamache speaks to Myrna about the idea that life is a series of losses, and how people adapted to that determined how happy and adjusted they can be with life. I will be continuing the series.