Review: Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny

It’s been six months since the case in the previous book The Brutal Telling was solved.  Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is still recovering, both physically & mentally, from this case, in which he arrested a his good friend & citizen of Three Pines for this heinous crime.  The guilt, the feelings of doubt, weighs more heavily than the physical.

While on leave, visiting his mentor in Quebec City, Gamache becomes involved in a case in which a man is found dead in the Literary and Historical Society. The victim, Augustin Renaud, was known to be on an obsessive hunt for the burial ground of Quebec’s founder, Champlain.

The new investigation doesn’t cut Gamache free of his ties to Three Pines, however.  He continues to receive pleas to reopen the case.   Gamache relives his feelings of guilt & doubt through flashbacks to this crime.

Bury Your Dead may very well be my favorite of the sixc-books in the Inspector Gamahe series. Whereas the citizens of Three Pines were the focus of the previous books in this series, Gamache himself is clearly the center of attention in this book.  Readers see a different side of Gamache, one full of emotion, both positive & negative.

Penny did an outstanding job of juggling/mixing the two storylines together.  While other reviews have stated the storyline was so slow-paced, I believe this pacing actually allowed the reader to become more engaged & invested in the characters & storyline.

Fans of intense, character-driven literary suspense will be enamored by Penny’s writing.  As this is a series, I do strongly recommend starting at the beginning  & reading the series in order to fully appreciate the depth of Penny’s characters.  Highly recommended.