Hardly the stuff of the average mystery novel. Yet even when they’re dealing with modern issues like PTSD, drug addiction, systemic racism, and police corruption, they’re all undercut with a highbrow literary bent and a thoroughly humanitarian, nigh-spiritual worldview. They balance many of the most comforting elements of cozy mysteries with many of the bleakest and most haunting elements of gritty modern noir or criminal procedurals. The books are also difficult to easily categorize. To start, it’s Canadian, and we all know the darkest crime a Canadian ever committed was creating Tim Hortons. The books have also won an absolute mountain of awards - including the Agatha Award, presented to literary cozies - seven times.Ĭonceptually, Inspector Gamache sounds like the last kind of story to go head to head with anything by the grand dame of murder. Turns out, Penny’s series is not only a Goodreads hit, but has proven so popular she’s churned out a total of 16 volumes since publishing the first, Still Life, in 2005 the 17th, The Madness of Crowds, will come out in August. (The site is notorious for its vicious and finicky readers who downvote books for the pettiest of reasons.) Therefore any title in the genre that had lots of Goodreads entries and a reader rating that was as high or higher than that of, say, And Then There Were None would be worth digging into.

I reasoned that if Goodreads users could agree on the merit of any mystery writer, it would be Christie. I discovered Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series of novels (also known as the Three Pines series) the way a proper detective might: by ransacking Goodreads lists and analyzing the ratings of all the cozy mysteries I could find, to see if any of those quirkily wholesome stories of small-town murder ranked higher than Agatha Christie.

Still life louise penny summary