bury your dead

bury your dead
armand gamache #6
louise penny
mystery/thriller
minotaur books
published 2010

It is Winter Carnival in Quebec City, bitterly cold and surpassingly beautiful.  Chief Inspector Armand Gamache has come not to join the revels but to recover from an investigation gone hauntingly wrong.  But violent death is inescapable, even in the apparent sanctuary of the Literary and Historical Society - where an obsessive historian's quest for the remains of the founder of Quebec, Samuel de Champlain, ends in murder.  Could a secret be buried with Champlain for nearly 400 years be so dreadful that someone would kill to protect it?

There are nearly three different stories moving along here in Bury Your Dead.  First we have the investigation that Armand is haunted by and then the murder of the historian and at the same time, Jean Guy is quietly investigating the murder from the previous novel, The Brutal Telling.

I knew next to nothing about Canadian history, much less about Quebec's so there was an interesting history lesson happening during Armand's reluctant investigation at the Lit & His, but truth be told, after the initial lesson I was bored.  Interspersed between the present going ons, both Armand and Jean Guy recall the events that led them to the places they are.  The horribly botched case that takes place between The Brutal Telling and Bury Your Dead.  Jean Guy's investigation in Three Pines kept me reading because I too thought there was no way that Olivier had committed the crime of that he was convicted.

Had this book been only about what happened in Quebec I would have been quite disappointed, but it wasn't so I hung on.  It was a nice change of pace for Jean Guy to interact with the villagers in Three Pines, especially Ruth and the gripping recounting of the previous case kept me biting my nail until the very end.