Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Stars Hollow meets the detective novel

Still Life by Louise Penny

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Still Life is the first Inspector Gamache novel in Louise Penny’s series, and for me it’s a backtrack- I started with the second novel, Dead Cold (alternate title: A Fatal Grace), back in February.  Still Life introduces us to all the main characters that show up in the later books, including the town of Three Pines and its close-knit community members.  (For such a quaint and friendly town, I get the feeling there are a lot murderers in Three Pines’ midst, if the length of […]

But her exterior wasn’t the issue.

A Fatal Grace by Louise Penny

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It’s always interesting to see where the second book of a new detective series is going to take us. The Tana French novels upend the first book by essentially retiring the previous detective and handing the series off like a baton. In others like Poirot, it’s more episodic with the detective embarking just another case. And in others still, it’s the next day practically like the Tess Monaghan books more or less do. Here it’s a little of both, at least so far, with Armand […]

Great artists put a lot of themselves into their works.

Still Life by Louise Penny

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This is the first novel by Louise Penny, a Canadian mystery writer, and this series was recommended to me by my school librarian by way of a conversation looking for books to supplement my craving for more writers like Tana French and Robert Galbraith. For the most part, I think this book is close, but I am hoping that some of the later books in the series took a little longer to develop the world around the plot/mystery. We are in a small village in […]

Visit the Morrin Centre in QC – I did!

Iron Bar and Bookshelves by Louisa Blair

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If you go to Quebec City, take the time to go to the Morrin Centre. It was a prison, a school, and then a library. I highly recommend the tour                                                           . This gem of a book presents the history of the place. It is split into three sections, not counting the introduction by Louise Penny, and […]

It feels like an old-fashioned mystery

Still Life by Louise Penny

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I’d seen recommendations for new books by Louise Penny popping up all over the place. I was interested in reading them, but I thought it best that I begin at the beginning. So, I picked up Still Life (2005), the first book in Penny’s prolific Inspector Gamache series. And I found Still Life to be a very pleasant murder mystery. I’d like to read the entire series, but there are so many books, it will take me awhile to get to all of them. An elderly woman is shot […]

“He knew time could heal. But it could also do more damage. A forest fire, spread over time, would consume everything.”

A Trick of the Light (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #7) by Louise Penny

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Clara Morrow has finally been discovered as an artist at the age of fifty. She has her own solo show in a prestigious Montreal art museum, and to celebrate, her friends are throwing her a party in their small village of Three Pines. Everything is going smashingly, until a dead body is discovered in her garden, and it turns out to be her old childhood friend, Lillian, with whom she had a bitter parting as an adult. With yet another dead body in close proximity […]



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