Bury Your Dead: A Chief Inspector Gamache Mystery: Book 6 by Louise Penny

 

Bury Your Dead: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel – Book 6

by Louise Penny

This is a pivotal book in this series,. It begins with the fallout from a horrible situation.

To be honest, reading it on the Kindle, the formatting isn’t clear as to whether the first few pages are meant to be a scene then we fast forward to present time, or whether it’s a flashback to the event. There is no italics to indicate a flashback, but neither is there a chapter heading or clear page break, just an extra line, before the beginning of the present day narrative. I’d say Penny intended for us to be totally present in that first scene, which took place before the events of the book.

And the scene is fairly simple – Chief Inspector Gamache, his second in command, Beauvoir, and a team are geared up, armed, and trying to retrieve a hostage. That much is clear, but who the hostage is, remains a mystery for a bit. As the details dripped in, I worried for Beauvoir. Then Gamache is sitting with his mentor and former chief, Emile Comeau, over breakfast in a Quebec City café.

This book is a masterful work of men recovering from an operation gone wrong, both mentally and physically. We get the information about what happened sprinkled throughout the book in flashbacks, until the full picture has been developed. At the same time, Gamache is caught up in a murder that has taken place in the library of the historical society where he has been spending time.

An historian, Renaud, who was obsessed with finding the body of Samuel de Champlain, has been murdered and buried in the cellar of the library. Was he on to something in finding Champlain? Why was he killed, and by whom?

Penny gives us a portrait of the city, with fascinating details and beauty, and a picture of political tension between French and English descendants that is equally fascinating. She brings in just the right amount of history to explain things without bogging down the narrative.

There are tiny little mysteries too, like why one character never speaks above a nearly inaudible whisper.

But there is another mystery running concurrently, one we might have thought was finished in the last book. Did Olivier really kill the hermit in Three Pines? Gamache had come to believe so, had provided enough evidence to have him convicted. Had he made a mistake? He asks Beauvoir to go to Three Pines and try to prove the opposite, that Olivier did not kill the hermit. Beauvoir thinks it’s a waste of time but he cannot refuse his Chief so he goes and throws his heart into it. At the same time, he is working on his own healing because he was shot in the raid, and the people of Three Pines help him in strange ways with both.

The characters in this book are wonderfully unique. It’s like the Island of Misfit Toys. One of my favorites is Ruth Zardo, an elderly poet who is more rude to you, the more she likes you.  

There is so much going on in this book, but all the elements – the raid gone wrong, the re-investigation of the Hermit’s murder, the historian’s murder in Quebec, the historical and present day tensions between the descendants of English and French, the mental and emotional healing of the two detectives - are braided together masterfully. It is truly an impressive book.

If you like mysteries at all, I highly recommend this series, and this book in particular.