Bury Your Dead

The most recent of Louise Penny's "Inspector Gamache" series shows her in fine form and Inspector Gamache at a low point. We catch up with him in Quebec City just as winter Carnaval is getting underway. You can feel the sub-zero temperatures reaching right down to your bones. He has come to stay with his former chief and mentor, while he ostensibly does some early historical research at a local English library. But the reality is that he is recovering from a Surete operation that went wrong in ways Gamache feels responsible for...we only gradually learn the outlines of that story. Meanwhile, Jean Guy, also recovering from physical wounds, is sent by Gamache to Three Pines to re-open the previous case (The Brutal Telling ). Three Pines bistro and B & B owner Gabri sends daily letters to Gamache asking this vexing question, if his partner Olivier had really killed the old man in the cabin, why would he move the body where it could be found. Gamache, too, has wrestled with this inconsistency since sending Olivier to prison. Meanwhile, in Quebec City, the body of a well-known local figure is found in the basement of the Literary and Historical society where Gamache has been researching, and he is asked by the staff and by the local police to lend a hand. We begin to see the dimensions of a long-standing animosity between the English and the French in this tale, as it colors everything about how the case is being handled and publicized. Penny does a masterful job of revealing the three stories in parallel and developing the relationships between her characters with even more richness, so that I can hardly wait to see what will come next. Having discovered Penny when she was already four novels into her series, I could indulge myself on a regular basis; not sure how I will endure having to wait for her to actually write another book.