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.
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…
My biggest surprise is I had no idea this was what I would categorize as a ‘cozy murder mystery’. I thought it would be a bit more hard hitting.
Take the location of a small town called Three Pines, I guess what do you expect.(not what I just read! Ha)
It was a simple but clever little mystery.
I thought some of the relationships were a bit weird. Some of the sub characters I didn’t know why we had to waste our time on them. Sure, it was to show more character depth within our main characters. Yet, I felt in the end they just added noise and slowed down the progression of the story.
It was slow, slow moving. It’s really my only big criticism on the book. I felt slightly bored sometimes. I’m not sure if it was the time of day I was reading it, at night. Or was I not in the mood? I don’t know. But a little slow from my taste. I did enjoy Detective Gamache.
Another reviewer mentioned how the name Gamache sounded/looked too much like ganache and they found that distracting. ME TOO! I want to thank them for making me feel less alone.
To summarize, I’m half-and-half if I would recommend this to my reader friends. It wasn’t bad by any means. As I said, it was a cozy mystery, what could be wrong about that? It just wasn’t what I was expecting.
Stats: 321 pages – First published October 3, 2005
cmacs paperbacks 
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