Still Life

Still Life is a mystery novel by the Canadian writer Louise Penny, published in 2005 and her first. Its detective is Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, who works for the Surete du Quebec, and its setting is the village of Three Pines, south of Montreal near the American border.

An elderly woman, Jane Neal, is found dead in the woods near the village during hunting season, and the village settles on the idea that a hunter's arrow went astray. Gamache and his team are sent out from Montreal to look into it.

Gamache, who reads people slowly and carefully, decides that the accident does not add up, and begins interviewing villagers who have known one another their whole lives. The book is as much about the town, its artists' colony and its long-held grudges as it is about the killing, and it moves at a slower, more patient pace than most crime fiction.

Penny's series went on to run for many further books, with Three Pines and much of its cast returning across them, and the first was adapted into a television film in 2013. Still Life took the Anthony Award for best first novel.