I first read this book in hardback when it came out in 2005, a year after we first moved to Canada. I loved it then, and I still love it now. The texture of Three Pines is both vivid and subtle, but very much a part of what makes this book special. Gamache is the kind of detective I quite like -- a bit cerebral, but nurturing of new subordinates, even the hopelessly insecure and brittle Agent Yvette Nichol.
Given that the series (now at 16 books) is as much about Three Pines as it is about Chief Inspector Gamache, I do find the following a bit unreal. Of course, this is only said
before the crime wave that Gamache brings to the village.
Quote:
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In the twenty-five years she’d lived in Three Pines she’d never, ever heard of a crime. The only reason doors were locked was to prevent neighbors from dropping off baskets of zucchini at harvest time.
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One thing that is different now on a re-read is that I'm much more in tune to the "Two Solitudes" of Canada, and especially of Quebec. We moved here 9 years after the _very_ close Quebec Independence Referendum of 1995, but were rather isolated from it by living on the west coast of British Columbia, which is one of the lease Francophone provinces. This friction is very evident in
Still Life, even though Gamache is fluently bilingual and appears equally comfortable in either French or English. The book itself includes many uniquely Canadian terms, such as
depanneur, which "roughly" equates to the American "7-eleven" kind of store, or the NYC bodega.