Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny

In “Bury Your Dead,” Penny takes on three simultaneous story lines, skillfully intertwining them in a way I’ve not seen done before. The first has to do with Chief Inspector Gamache’s struggle to recover from a hostage scene that has gone incredibly wrong, but it’s a scene that the readers of this series was unfamiliar, a scene that led to the death of an agent and the near fatal shooting of Gamache and his closest associate, Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir. The second story line has to do with the murder that was solved in the last book, “The Brutal Telling,” in which the resident of Three Pines, Olivier, was convicted of the crime of murder. While all evidence convincingly pointed to Oliver, Gamache was never satisfied that justice had been served, so as Gamache recovered from his wounds in Quebec, Beauvoir was sent back to Three Pines to take a new look at the old case.

The third story line occurred as Gamache was recuperating from his physical and emotional wounds in Quebec City in the warmth of his retired mentor, the former Chief Inspector of Surete du Quebec, Emile Comeau. Gamache’s hobby was to do research on the history of Quebec and he had a particular interest in finding the body of Samuel de Champlain, the founder of the city. In the course of his research, a new murder is committed that has a direct impact on Gamache’s quest. In the course of leading the reader through this story, the history of Quebec is fully reviewed and the author discussed the ongoing tensions between the English and French communities in the city.

Penny slips some great lines into her novels, and she did so again. While reviewing the history of the province of Quebec and discussing the people who were most fascinated by it, Penny wrote, "And while forgetting the past might condemn people to repeat it, remembering it too vividly condemned them to never leave."

This is a beautiful book, well written, creative, but if you new to Penny’s books, this is not the place to start. Her other books might be freestanding, but this one is not. At minimum, one should read “The Brutal Telling” before this one, but it would be better yet to start with book #1 of the Armand Gamache series, “Still Life.” If you’ve already read Penny and have finished “The Brutal Telling,” this one should be the very next book in your reading queue. With those caveats, Penny gets 5 stars for this effort.