Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This will be a review for people who, like me, have not read Louise Penny before, A friend loaned me a stack of books, including Bury Your Dead, which is itself 6th in a series about Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. Normally, I’d dutifully plow through the earlier books so as to be able to appreciate this one the more. But this time I decided to try an experiment, see if the book stood on its own.
And I’m happy to report that it does. Penny manages to stack four mysteries on top of one another: Who killed Augustin Renaud? Who kidnapped Agent Morin? Did Olivier really kill the Hermit? And just where is Champlain buried? Some of the mysteries are intertwined with one another, but some are not, serving more to thematic support the other mysteries, and help develop Armand Gamache for the reader.
Which is why the book stands on its own. I don’t know what Gamache is like in the earlier books, and maybe I wouldn’t be able to travel with him on his journey of sorrow and shame if I knew him already. Here is man, seemingly, intelligent, thoughtful, and heroic, who is nevertheless all too human and therefore fallible. And what do they say about the mighty when they fall?
But for all that, Bury Your Dead can be taken as just a good cozy who-dun-it. It’s a murder mystery, a history mystery, and book mystery. There’s also a little bit of politics but only a very little if, like me, you’re an apathetic American who can appreciate neither Catholic vs Protestant nor French Canadian versus English. In that sense, the novel’s somewhat exotic, but not too rich to give you a toothache.
I suppose I’ll get around to the earlier Gamache novels eventually. Although I’m tempted to leave my memory of this one intact by not getting to know the younger Chief Inspector more. Perhaps when I’m ready, I’ll try another experiment. As for you who have not read Penny yet: go ahead.