Monday, November 21, 2011

Still Life by Louise Penny

A friend recommended these - at least I think she did. The author's name is different, but the town and its general location are the same. I will check with her next time I see her. From her description, I expected a quintessential "cozy" mystery; she kept telling me how "sweet" they were. I did not find this sweet, although it is set in a tiny village (ala Miss Marple). The tiny village is somewhere not very near Montreal, and if she bases an entire series of murders in this village, it will soon be a ghost town. I suppose fictional villages are flexible. They are close enough to Montreal that the detective sent out to investigate is a Chief Inspector of the Surete, not a little old lady with her knitting.

I enjoyed it - enough to read the next one (probably even before I go back to the cookie mysteries - definitely cozy). Maybe my friend didn't read this particular one. I went back and got the first one. She said something about deserving murder victims - and this one was definitely not deserving. We also had insanity, gratuitous cruelty, homophobia, and an incompetent police officer who is fired by the Inspector. There wasn't a great deal of action - but I did love the scene where the murderer has another victim tied up in the basement and two policemen (including the inspector) and her husband come to the rescue and fall down the stairs, which the murderer has rigged to explain the fatal "accident."

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