Still Life (A Three Pines Mystery)

Still Life combines elements of a cozy (small intimate community, violence occurring off stage) with a police procedural (the detective is a genial detective from out of town). The community secrets are a bit too abstractly complicated for me to really love the mystery, but it's good enough to be interesting.

3.5 rounded down because I expected better but it's not bad--first of a series and I'm going on to the second but it reads like it was written way before 2007, maybe back when "human bean" was still a new joke. The Nicole character didn't seem to belong in the story. Maybe she shows up in future books and her introduction wasn't a mistake.

It had some 4 star observations and the characters were mostly amusing. I didn't guess "who done it" in advanced, so good enough plotting, though the murderer trying to kill an important character while the police were desperately looking for her has been done way too often and should be against the law.

My wife and I read this together, taking turns reading aloud. If not for our mutual shock and awe at how not-for-us the book was, I wouldn't have been able to finish it. We laughed at the writing, and snuck in (what should have been) ridiculous embellishments to see if the other would catch it ("Wait, does it really say that?!") This made it all the better (or worse) when the answer was, "Yes, it's really in the book. Look!" (For those who might take pause, I assure you after a beat any unnoticed embellishments were revealed by the current reader before proceeding.)

Neither of us reads modern "cozy" murder mysteries, so maybe we're lacking the experience or context required to appreciate a book like this. I'm told the series gets better, but so far the first third of the next book (we're trying to give the first three a chance due to receiving them as a gift) doubles down on the worst aspects of the first book.

Cheers to all of those who enjoy the series. And hugs to all of those as traumatized by this book as we were.

I love a good murder mystery, and I usually enjoy charming inspectors, like Hercule Poirot, and so the books about Chief Inspector Armand Gamache caught my eye. Unfortunately, it was probably the most boring book I have read this year.

An older lady is found shot by an arrow in the small community of Three Pines and Gamache comes to town to solve this homicide. We meet a quirky cast of characters that miraculously didn't have a single character I connected with. Gamache himself isn't charming or particularly smart, I didn't care for his staffers. Nothing about this mystery was exciting in any shape or form. I usually fell asleep within 2-5 pages of reading. Only by sheer force of will did I push through this book to find out whodunnit. That finale left me about as excited as the rest of the book. Giving this series a hard pass.