Still Life

Three Pines is a small, idyllic town tucked away in rural Quebec where everybody knows everyone and nobody locks their doors. Jane Neal, an elderly spinster, has submitted a drawing to the local art show and invited her friends to celebrate at her house, the first time in the history of the town she has offered to show her art or her home to anyone. Unfortunately, she is soon found murdered in the woods, sending the small town reeling. Just what secret was hidden in her art or her home that drove one of the villagers to murder?

Still Life might just be the epitome of a cozy, character-driven mystery, but it also has an element of police procedural to it. We learn about several villagers, including Jane’s circle of friends, and each has their own fleshed-out life and personality. The thing that Still Life does best, which is so vital and important to death in real life but is either taken for granted or purposefully downplayed in most murder mysteries, is grief. Still Life displays the cast’s grief more and better than any other detective novel I’ve read, and as a result we do get to better understand the shock and suffering felt by the residents of Three Pines.

The novel also focuses on the character and experiences of the investigation team, giving the story its police procedural undercurrent. The lead investigator is Gamache, an honest and polite inspector, who’s he’s joined by Beauvoir, his right-hand man, and… Nichol, a young policewoman who has just been given a chance in the homicide investigation squad.

Nichol is the unsightly blemish on an otherwise strong cast. She initially seems polite and competent, but is soon revealed to be headstrong, arrogant, and idiotic. There are two issues with Nichol. First, the mistakes she makes do not feel like the kind of errors a real person would make. For instance, at one point, Gamache tells Nichol that she needs to be able to admit when she’s forgotten or screwed something up if she wants to succeed in his unit. So Nichol starts saying she’s forgotten or screwed up things, even when she didn’t. (And not in a Machiavellian “I’ll do it to prove I understood his lesson” way, in a “He told me to say ‘I forgot’ so I’ll just keep saying it until he’s happy because obviously he just likes to hear those words for the sake of hearing them and doesn’t care about actual meaning or context” way.) This just isn’t something someone would do! These errors feel like contrived, manufactured drama. The second issue is that, even though Nichol is a horrible idiot, the book devotes significant time to her point of view without making any sort of stance on her. Nichol is a new member of Gamache’s squad and eager to make a good impression, but keeps getting in her own way. Are we supposed to be rooting her on? Feel bad for her? Revel in her failures? The book seems to jump around these feelings, and by the end I didn’t care and just wanted her segments to be over.

To be clear, the issue is not that Nichol is not a good person. There is another person in the book, Yolanda, who is a horrible human being but a great character. The issue is that the actions Nichol takes do not feel like the sort of actions anyone in Nichol’s position would ever take. While most of the cast feel like detailed 3D renders, Nichol is a crudely drawn cardboard cutout.

The book is focused on the suspects’ personal issues, and Nichol handling (or bungling, really) her first homicide investigation, and the methodical and procedural investigation of the crime. There isn’t much trickiness in the crime itself. The most interesting ideas are contained in the motive, which, to the reader, is obviously tied to the painting Jane submitted to the art show. But Gamache does not realize the significance of the painting until late in the book, so most of his investigation is focused on things like collecting alibis and identifying the murder weapon. The solution behind the meaning of the painting works, but isn’t anything mind-blowing.

It also turns out that the murderer is a compulsive liar who lied about nearly everything we thought we knew about them... but we’re never given any clues to suggest the murderer’s lies, so this feels more like Louise Penny simply declaring that it is so rather than a satisfying resolution to the book’s mysteries.

Still Life is cozy, just like the town it takes place in. The people are generally nice, but there are definitely some bad apples. The book deals not only with the murder, but also explores Francophone-Anglophone issues and LGBT discrimination. Above all, Gamache is a comforting narrator; he feels like your kind grandpa, and is as pleasant as Nichol is not. Still Life is passable, unobjectionable, and not much more.