Still Life (Inspector Gamache No. 1) - Louise Penny

I’m guessing that reading Louise Penny’s first Inspector Gamache novel, Still Life,only after having read half-a-dozen of the latest books in the series has given me a whole different perspective on the novel than someone meeting Gamache for the first time here would have. After all, I already know Gamache, his family, his fellow Canadian cops, and his Three Pines neighbors pretty well. For that reason, Still Life read more like a prequel for me than it did an introduction to a whole new series of detective novels.

Still Life introduces the little Canadian village of Three Pines both to readers and to Inspector Gamache who prior to being called there to investigate what could turn out to be a murder was unaware of the village’s existence despite living within a relatively short drive of the place. Jane Neal, one of the little community’s most respected and loved members, has been found dead in the surrounding forest. If there had actually been any snow on the ground, one could be forgiven for wondering if Jane had died while in the process of creating a snow angel. Gamache and his team determine quickly enough that the woman has been shot through the heart by an arrow. Now they need to determine whether she was murdered or killed in some kind of a tragic hunting accident. If murder, who could possibly have had a motive to kill the kindly woman? If a hunting accident, why has no one taken responsibility for what happened?

Louise Penny

Gamache moves the core of his investigative team to Three Pines for the duration, primarily Jean Guy Beauvoir and Isabelle LaCoste, but including an arrogant rookie investigator whose laziness and insecurities come close to undermining the whole investigation long before it closes in on the killer. There are lots of twists and turns leading to a succession of possible suspects (including some of the characters who will go on to become series regulars), and I thought I had the case solved twice before the real culprit was finally revealed – and I never did figure it out on my own.

For me, the unexpected fun of Still Life came from watching Inspector Gamache get acquainted with all the central characters from the succeeding books in the series. Despite having to consider just about everyone in the village a suspect at one time or another, Gamache slowly comes to the realization that he likes these people and feels comfortable around them. And they reciprocate the feeling. By the end of the novel, it begins to seem as if Gamache is at least a little bit sad to have to leave Three Pines and return to the big city atmosphere of Montreal.  At one point in the second half of the novel, Penny shares Gamache’s thoughts with us this way:

            “Looking around he realized how much he liked this place and these people. Too bad one of them was a murderer.” (page 208)

Then as the investigation began to make real progress, Gamache had time for further reflection on the village and its inhabitants:

            “Gamache again marveled at the people who chose to live in this area. Was Margaret Atwood a garbage collector perhaps? Or maybe Prime Minister Mulrooney had picked up a second career delivering the mail. No one was whom they seemed. Everyone was more.” (Page 285)

And finally, in the book’s last two sentences, Penny makes it very clear that Inspector Gamache has fallen in love with just about everything about Three Pines:

            “Life was far from harried here. But neither was it still.” (Page 318)

And the rest is history.

Bottom Line: Still Life is an excellent introduction to a crime fiction series that has grown into one of the best ones out there. The mystery solved is a solid one that will keep readers guessing while introducing them to the various characters they will become so familiar with in later Gamache books. I recommend both the book and the series.

Still Life: The First Inspector Gamache Novel - Take One

I was not one of those lucky readers who discovered Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache books when the first one was published back in 2005. I, in fact, did not become acquainted with the inspector until 2010 when I somehow stumbled upon that year’s addition to the series (book number six) Bury Your Dead.I really liked that one, but I didn’t make the effort to check out Penny’s backlist or even to read book seven when it was published in 2011. And I never even realized that a Gamache novella, The Hangman, was published in late 2010. But then I lucked into an ARC of The Beautiful Mysteryin 2012, and that one was so good that I could not wait for the next Gamache to be published in 2013 – but I still missed it and haven’t read it to this day. 

I’ve done much better since my haphazard approach to the series first began, though, and have read The Long Way Home (2014), The Nature of the Beast (2015), A Great Reckoning (2016), Glass Houses(2017), and Kingdom of the Blind (2018) not long after each was published. So, although I feel like I know the good inspector and the residents of Three Pines pretty well at this point, I still have this huge gap in my reading: the first five books, the eighth book, and the novella. And just a few days ago, the fifteenth novel in the Gamache series, A Better Man, was published, so there’s that. So, what better time to go back and read Still Life, the book that started it all?

Louise Penny

I’m about 25% of the way through Still Life right now, and it’s settling into the murder investigation that comprises the novel’s main plotline. Reading this one so far out of sequence as I am is proving to be a bit like going back in time via a real life time-machine. It has been a such a great treat to see Gamache and the Three Pines residents all show up in the book’s first thirty pages that I found myself making notes about when they all first appeared and how Penny described them that first time. 

Some of the things I learned in the first fifty or so pages of Still Lifesurprised me, some didn’t:

·      Gamache was introduced on the book’s first page as being in his mid-fifties and suffering somewhat of a stalled career (I had wrongly assumed that he was a much younger man when the series opened and that his career would have been on a markedly upward path.)

·      The next two characters introduced are the artists Clara and Peter Morrow. (Knowing what comes much later for one of them makes this introduction seem a poignant one.) 

·      Ruth Zardo is the next to be mentioned, but only briefly. (She is my favorite of the Three Pines cast.)

·      Next up are the gay couple who run the bistro, Olivier and Gabri – who play a key role in kicking off the plot twists in Still Life.

·      Then comes bookstore owner Myrna Landers who is described as a colorfully dressed, heavyset, former psychologist who also just happens to be black (her race is thrown in almost as an afterthought; I liked that approach).

·      In what is almost a throwaway sentence, Penny makes reference to the source of Gamache’s career troubles, something called the “Arnot case.”

·      Gamache had never heard of Three Pines despite it being only minutes away from his Montreal home, and he would have never discovered its existence had he not been called there to investigate a murder.

·      Gamache has already been working with Jean Guy Beauvoir for ten years.

·      The origin of the Three Pines name is explained early on, although I remember it being repeated in at least one much later novel (which makes sense).

·      The first meeting between Ruth Zardo and Gamache is an absolute hoot, and in addition to what it reveals about both of them, it explains some of the good-natured verbal sparring between the two that happens in succeeding books.

·      Gamache has had the same rank for the past twelve years but it really doesn’t bother him all that much. He is a happy man, and he and his wife have a very special relationship.

It will, of course, be interesting to watch all of these characters and their various interpersonal relationships develop but going back to this “origin story” is really fun. It makes me wonder if I would have even noticed half the things I’ve noted here if I had not already read half of the series. So, I guess my takeaway from this experience (realizing it may not work this way for everyone) is that if you come to a long series somewhere in the middle of it, or even later, don’t despair because that might be a good thing in the long run. It certainly has been for me in the case of the Inspector Gamache books. 

All Our Wrong Todays - Elan Mastai

With the exception of time travel novels, science fiction is not a genre that I’ve done a whole lot of reading in in recent years. But I love time travel stories so much that I jump at every new one I can find, including this 2017 offering from Canadian author Elan Mastai. The best thing about All Our Wrong Todays is that it takes enough of a different approach to some of the usual paradoxes of time travel that it seems relatively fresh no matter how many time travel novels a reader may have already read. The basic question being explored in All Our Wrong Todays is just how easy it would be for a time-traveler inadvertently to change the present-day world by visiting the past. Just how much interaction in the past would it take to do something critical  enough to alter the present in significant enough a way to impact the lives of billions of people – for good or bad?

Just ask his father; Tom Barren is kind of a loser. Despite living in almost exactly the world anyone growing up on that old cartoon seriesThe Jetsons hoped we would have by the year 2000, Tom really hasn’t done much with his life. “Flying cars, robot maids, food pills, teleportation, jet packs, moving sidewalks, ray guns, hover boards, space vacations, and moon bases” (page 7). It’s all there. Now, Tom’s father, on the other hand, is a recognized scientific genius on the verge of sending the very first team of six time-travelers back into the past, so it’s easy to understand why he is so frustrated by having an only child who has failed miserably at every single thing he has ever attempted. 

Elan Mastai

But Tom’s old man hasn’t seen anything yet because Tom is about to make the biggest mistake of his life, one that will change “the fabric of the universe” in ways no one could have imagined possible. One oversight Tom makes as he leaves present-day 2016, compounded by a careless move he makes when he arrives in 1965 to witness a major event in world history for himself, completely changes the planet’s history. And when Tom returns to 2016 there are no flying cars, moving sidewalks, robot maids, or jet packs to be found. Instead, he finds himself living in what he considers to be the rather primitive conditions of 2016 as the rest of us know it today. 

Tom’s old life, however, was not perfect. He had a few close friends, but he had no meaningful work; his father was a complete jerk who just barely acknowledged Tom’s existence; and his mother spent every waking hour taking care of his father’s needs, pretty much ignoring Tom’s problems in the process. But it was a damn comfortable lifestyle, and Tom misses it. On the other hand, in this new world created by Tom’s foolish mistakes his father is a nice guy whom everyone loves; his mother is a highly respected professional; he is a celebrated Canadian architect; he has a sister who didn’t exist in the old world; and he thinks he has found the love of his life.

So, what’s the guy to do? On the one hand, he has caused the world to be a much harsher place in which war is still common, and he has caused billions of people never to be born at all. On the other hand, he really, really prefers this version of his family to the one he had before his time travel blunders – and he is hopelessly in love. Does he go back to 1965 and try to fix things or does he leave well enough alone? What would you do?

Bottom Line: All Our Wrong Todays is a fun, often thriling, read, but it’s a book that the reader has to pay close attention to while reading it because of the complicated theories of time travel being tested and contrasted throughout the novel. Too, it does have one of those endings in which several years of plot are summarized as kind of a “where are they now” moment. I’m not fond of those and would have much preferred a second book to this kind of ending. That said, I still recommend this one to fans of the genre.

Harry Potter Books Yanked from Another School Library

I really thought we were beyond this kind of thing, but I guess I was wrong. It seems that another school has decided to ban the Harry Potter books from its school library because of concerns that young readers of the series may just start practicing black magic because the J.K. Rowling books make it look cool or something. This time around it’s St. Edward Catholic School, a pre-kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school in Nashville.

It seems (and I’m not making this up) that the Reverend Dan Rehill consulted a group of exorcists who advised him to purge his school’s library of all the Harry Potter books. 

According to the Washington Post, Rehill explained his decision this way:

“These books present magic as both good and evil, which is not true, but in fact a clever deception,” he explained. “The curses and spells used in the books are actual curses and spells; which when read by a human being risk conjuring evil spirits into the presence of the person reading the text."

Apparently, many of the parents paying to have their kids educated at St. Edward do not agree with the development and are disturbed that they were allowed no input into the decision to remove the books. The Post quotes a portion of the email that Rehill sent to parents after the fact:

“The books use nefarious means to attain the goals of the characters, including the ‘good’ characters,” he wrote, arguing that an act cannot be considered morally good under Catholic theology if it is accomplished through questionable methods. The Harry Potter books, he claimed, “promote a Machiavellian approach to achieving the ends they desire with whatever means are necessary.”

St. Edward School, Nashville

By this standard, St. Edward students are going to miss out on lots of good books, including many of the classics. But all of this will, of course, come as no surprise to Rowling because her Harry Potter books have been challenged several times in the past. 

Rebecca Hammel, the superintendent of schools for the Nashville Diocese, does not seem to agree with the pastor's decision, but she admits that because the Church has no official position on the Harry Potter books the pastor has the right to remove them from his school's library. St. Edward is the only school in the Diocese to have done so. (See Post news article for details.)

I don't see anything good coming for anyone involved in this situation: parents, students, the school, or the pastor. Parents are probably second-guessing the school's leadership; students are not being allowed exposure to other points-of-view; the school is receiving negative publicity that can only hurt it in the short term; and the pastor has pretty much made a fool of himself. 

This is just so 1950s. 

Metal Detecting: The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Uncovering History, Adventure, and Treasure - Mark Smith

Back in the mid-eighties or so, I spent a lot of my free time fooling around with a metal detector that I would take way out in the country or to some of the old schoolhouse sites in my county – many of which go back to the early 1900s. I often came home with a handful of old silver dimes and quarters, and maybe a few old nickels and wheat pennies. It was a nice combination of fun and exercise that I really enjoyed. But that was before some of life’s more intricate responsibilities took over and my spare time became pretty much non-existent. That old metal detector was put away – and eventually misplaced in one move or another – sometime around 1990.

Well, now I’m retired, and guess what? I have lots of free time again. That got me to wondering what it would be like to take up the hobby again, but when I started looking around for a new detector I learned that technology has pushed the hobby way beyond where it was when I last enjoyed it. I didn’t know where to begin -  and that led me to Mark Smith’s Metal Detecting: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Uncovering History, Adventure, and Treasure. Now, I don’t really expect to uncover a whole lot of history or treasure, but if metal detecting can get me to spend more time outdoors walking, bending my knees, digging and re-covering a bunch of holes, and using some of the muscles I barely remember having anymore, it will have served its purpose.

Metal Detecting is the perfect first step for a beginner or someone like me who is being exposed to the hobby’s new equipment and rules for the first time. Metal detectors come in a variety of price ranges these days (with goof ones priced roughly from $300 to $2500) and they are built for a variety of purposes. Some are best for finding gold, some for coin-shooting, some for historical relics, etc. Some are more suited for highly mineralized ground than others, some work best in and around saltwater, and others are fully submergible in freshwater rivers and streams. Mark Smith covers all of these in this introduction to the hobby.

But there’s a whole lot more to metal detecting than the simple purchase of the metal detector best suited for your particular needs. Mastering the quirks and qualities of your particular detector will be between you and the machine’s manufacturer. Smith can’t help you much with that.

Some of my gear: detector, headphones, and pin-pointer

But what he can do is teach you the “rules of the road” (where you can and where you cannot legally search for stuff); what kind of spots to search (beaches, riverbeds, old homesites, old schoolgrounds, etc.); how patient research can lead you to unsearched locations; what support tools you will need (hand spades, small specialized shovels, battery operated pin-pointers, gloves, knee pads, and the like); how to improve the effectiveness of your detector by adding additional search coils to your inventory; and the importance of joining the metal detecting support community, among other things. Personally, as much as anything else in the book, I appreciated the chapters on the etiquette of metal detecting. That includes the art (and, yes, it is really an art) of digging a search hole in a manner that allows you to cover it back up so effectively that it’s almost like you were never there (I’m getting really good at this, I’m proud to say).

Bottom Line: Metal Detecting: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide is really a crash course that covers every aspect of the hobby. This is definitely the place for newbies (or returnees to the hobby like me) to start. Reading this book will save the new hobbyist time, money, and grief galore in the long run – and it may even be the thing that keeps the more aggressive of them out of jail. If you are thinking about investing some time and money in the hobby, you can’t go wrong with this one.

Sons and Soldiers - Bruce Henderson

I am far from being a World War II historian, but I have a particular interest in the war’s European theatre and have read a few books on the fighting that took place in that part of the world. Still, for whatever reason, I had not heard of the exploits and important contributions to the war effort made in Europe by a unique group of young men known as the Ritchie Boys before picking up Bruce Henderson’s Sons and Soldiers: The Untold Story of the Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned with the U.S. Army to Fight Hitler.

As Hitler’s intentions toward the Jews became more and more obvious, Jewish parents began to scramble for ways to get their families out of Germany and the rest of Nazi-occupied Europe before it was too late. But there were quotas and other delays to deal with in countries such as the United States and Canada. Ultimately, because obtaining visas and otherwise negotiating all of the paperwork involved in that whole exercise was such a time-consuming process, many thousands of Jews wanting to escape never made it. However, many desperate Jewish families were able to get at least their sons to the United States – and many of these brand-new U.S. citizens could not wait to return to Germany to fight the Nazis who had taken so much from them and their families.

Bruce Henderdson

Rather surprisingly (and I’m honestly surprised here because the military does not always work this way), someone in the U.S. Army had the foresight to understand just how big an asset these Ritchie Boys could be if used as interrogators of captured German prisoners. They knew the language, they intimately understood the culture that had spawned their prisoners, and they knew just how to provoke (or trick) those prisoners into revealing much more than they wanted to reveal to their interrogators. And they knew precisely how best to put the pieces of gathered intelligence together in order to do the most damage to the German army possible. 

Ritchie Boy intelligence teams were assigned to all the major combat units in Europe. They jumped out of airplanes in France with the 82^ndAirborne, they fought their way from Normandy through Belgium and the Netherlands, and they were deep inside Germany when the war in Europe finally ended. It is estimated that some sixty percent of the intelligence gathered in Europe during World War II originated with the Ritchie Boys. Not only did these men face certain death if captured and identified as German Jews by the German army, they faced a similar threat from U.S. soldiers who often found it difficult to distinguish them from the German infiltrators who sometimes wore the uniforms of captured or killed American soldiers. Despite these special dangers, the Ritchie Boys contributed greatly to the Allied effort to defeat Hitler, and they saved thousands of lives in the process.

Bottom Line: Sons and Soldiers reveals a long-kept secret about a group of young men who deserve much more honor and credit for what they accomplished during World War II than they have received.  Bruce Henderson’s account of the war experiences of six of these men is well researched and reads almost like a war thriller at times. What the Ritchie Boys did was remarkable, and it is a shame that it took this long for a book like this one to be written about them.