Book Review: Still Life and Death
I received this galley in exchange for an honest review.
Author: Tracy Gardner
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Publisher: Hallmark Publishing
Publish Date: August 10, 2021
Series: Shepard Sisters Mysteries #3
Format: eBook
★★★☆☆
This book is perfect for those that like: Loving Families, Elaborate Revenge Plots, and Declarations of Love Involving Sailboats.
You might not like this book if you aren’t into: Switching POVs or Romance in Your Mysteries.
Purchase: Bookshop / Barnes & Noble / Amazon
Summary: Savanna Shepherd, a former art authenticator turned grade school art teacher, is delighted when her Uncle Max and Uncle Freddie move to Carson. Uncle Max takes a job at Libby’s Blooms, where Savanna teaches a still life painting class for adults. But one morning, Uncle Max finds a dead body in the rooftop greenhouse…and even worse, it looks like an inside job.
Savanna and her sisters—Skylar, a lawyer, and Sydney, the owner of a pet shop and grooming salon—dig in to find the real murderer. With their connections to the community and Savanna’s keen eye for details, they uncover longstanding resentments and horticultural clues. Meanwhile, Savanna’s dating local doctor Aidan Gallager, but she worries it’ll cause a scandal since his daughter is in her class. As Savanna’s investigation leads her into thorny situations, the killer may be arranging another murder: her own.
Still Life and Death is the latest installment of the Shepherd Sisters Mysteries from Tracy Gardner and while I’m not sure if this is the last of the series, it felt like it.
I’ve come to truly love Savanna and her sisters, Sydney and Skylar, and quite frankly, the whole of Carson has my cozy mystery-loving heart. The Shepherd family is close-knit and loves one another very much and with each book we saw them not only lean into each other more but also watch their family grow. Children were born, more of the Shepherd family relocated to Carson, and the two single sisters, Savanna and Sydney, found their partners and added them to the mix. Still Life and Death really highlighted their love and care for one another and it’s one of the parts of this series that I loved and will miss the most.
The goodbye tone wasn’t the only difference in this latest book. This story felt more like a romance novel than a cozy mystery as the murder and resulting investigation seemed to take a backseat to both Savanna and Sydney’s relationships with their respective partners, Aidan and Finn. As a fan of this series, I was more than fine with this because Hi, I’m a Romance Reader, but if you are new to the series and this is your first book, you might not appreciate the more romantic storylines.
That being said, this was another delightful read, if not a bittersweet one. I will be sad to see these characters go, but at the same time, this book gave us a very nice send-off with most of the characters getting their happy endings and tying up loose ends from the first two books. I hope I am wrong and there are more stories for the Shepherd Sisters, but if this is it, this was the best goodbye Tracy could have given us.