Still Life by Louise Penny

Still Life by Louise Penny is the first novel in the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series (13 books as of now!). It's a cozy mystery set in a small Canadian town a couple of hours from Montreal, but regularly left off the map. Beloved spinster Jane Neal is shot by an arrow while walking in the woods near her house and Gamache and his team swoop in to figure out whodunnit.

I found the setting to be quite remarkable. Quebec is an interesting place and you could feel the tension between the Anglophiles and Francophiles quite palpably throughout the story. There was a great line that referred to Earl Grey as "the opiate of the Anglos" that made me snort.  I also thought the the descriptions of the town, especially in early morning musings from Gamache, were well done, evoking the peacefulness that surrounds this town, despite the evil that had so recently been perpetrated.  I could really see the small cottages nestled right next to each other and the small businesses ringing the town square.

But in general there were too many characters and too little development of the characters.  There were stereotypical gay men, loud-mouthed lady who is actually a famous poet, the lazy trust fund kid, the mean kid whose parents are scared of him, and a host of other people who get only the most superficial aspects of their personalities fleshed out.  The inner life of Gamache himself is also quite limited. We get lots of time with him in which he's ruminating, but then the scene always cuts out before we get what he learned out of that rumination.  I get that it's a mystery novel, but at least give us SOMETHING to go on.

I won't be reading any of the other books in this series which is a bit disappointing because I had hoped to find a new author with a bunch of series that I could chip my way through, but I guess Penny isn't going to be that author.

Edited to add:
 

After a reread in 2022, I stand by this review.  3/5 stars and I won't read more in the series.

Lines of note:

I went through a period in my life when I had no friends, when the phone never rang, when I thought I would die from loneliness. I know that the real blessing her isn't that I have a book published, but that I have so many people to thank. (last paragraph from the Acknowledgements that start the book)

What a powerful statement.

The only reason doors were locked was to prevent neighbors from dropping off baskets of zucchini at harvest time. (page 4)

Ha ha. Life in a small town.

The arrowhead seemed to yearn to cut through his palm. Hurtled from a bow with all the force thousands of years of need could produce, it would without a doubt pass straight through a person. It's a wonder guns were ever invented when you already had such a lethal and silent weapon. (page 98)

Interesting.