'Three Pines is made up of good people, but one of us is festering.' The discovery of a dead body in the woods on Thanksgiving Weekend brings Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his colleagues from the Surete du Quebec to a small village in the Eastern Townships. Gamache cannot understand why anyone would want to deliberately kill well-loved artist Jane Neal, especially any of the residents of Three Pines - a place so free from crime it doesn't even have its own police force. But Gamache knows that evil is lurking somewhere behind the white picket fences and that, if he watches closely enough, Three Pines will start to give up its dark secrets...

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I feel like I'm the last person to jump on the Louise Penny train, but I am so glad that I did.

I loved this book--I loved the town of Three Pines, I loved Inspector Gamache, and I loved that I did not figure this mystery out! I mean, I thought I had. However, my guess came late in the book and I was blindsided when the reveal was made. That will make nearly any book a winner for me.

I have read a number of comments that this book was slow. That was not my experience. Granted, it may be because I was so taken by the world that Penny creates. However, the fact that Penny took the time to walk through all the steps and bits of this mystery. The necessary clues are there, but you probably won't see them without some hindsight.

Anyway, count me in as a Penny fan. I'm off the read all of her other books now.

My book club just loves Louise Penny. I thought it was intriguing and complicated at the very end. But they solved the crime. On to the 2nd book.

An easy read - pretty standard murder mystery. Jane has used her house as her palette to record all the events in a Canadian town. Her death reveals all of the secrets of the town including her killer.

I have read all her books. I love them mostly because I don't know Whodunnit until the end. Hope she keeps it up. The movie wasn't very good but it was nice to see the town and the people but the man who played Gamache wasn't right. Still everyone was good, especially the one in the monastery.

The first two pages were promising. Then it went downhill. I was told that it had great characters- well, after 30 pages all I had were a bunch of names and useless descriptions. And a small town in which, apparently, everyone is a successful artist/antique dealer/bookseller... yet there aren't very many tourists. How is that supposed to work?

Is this what modern fiction is like? Maybe that's why I don't read much of it...

The first in a series of Canadian mysteries. They share many similarities with gentle mysteries, but have a bit more bite. There’s definitely a murder, but nothing too extravagant or gory in the details. And while Inspector Gamache is definitely a seasoned investigator, his calm and soothing manner reflect the atmosphere of the books. An excellent book for those who want a who-dunnit without a lot of violence and gore.

The detective series that Louise Penny begins with Still Life is one of my favorites. The novels have an interesting set of characters that continue from one novel to the next, including a detective more interested in morality than personal success. The focus on morality over law reminds me a lot of the Cadfael series by Edith Pargeter.

Love her books but I find the audio books by far the best way to enjoy the series