REVIEWED BY WALTER ALBERT:         


LOUISE PENNY – Still Life. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, July 2006; paperback reprint, May 2007. First published in Canada & the UK: Headline, hc & pb, 2005.

   A Canadian rural mystery, with Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Quebec Sûreté and his team called in to investigate the suspicious death of Jane Neal, a reclusive resident of Three Pines, felled by an arrow.

   The strength of the novel is in its portrait of the town and its colorful inhabitants, but Gamache and his team are also nicely portrayed, with Gamache’s sharply observant eye seldom missing a significant detail in the convoluted relationships that make the investigation difficult to pursue. A promising debut for the series.

Bibliographic data:   The Chief Inspector Gamache mysteries.

1. Still Life.

LOUISE PENNY

2. Dead Cold (UK/Canada), A Fatal Grace (US).

LOUISE PENNY

3. The Cruelest Month.

LOUISE PENNY

4. The Murder Stone (UK/Canada), A Rule Against Murder (US).

LOUISE PENNY

5. The Brutal Telling.

LOUISE PENNY