Bury Your Dead

 Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny, 371 pgs. 

Unable to resolve terrible events in his own recent history, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache turns to historical mysteries for comfort. He spends his days in the Literary and Historical Society, an enclave of English literature in the midst of Francophone Quebec, distracting himself with research on incidents that occurred many years ago. Inspector Gamache soon realizes he is not the only one ruminating on the past, as an obsessive historian turns up dead in this safe haven of research. While Inspector Gamache works with Canadian history, Inspector Beauvoir returns to Three Pines for comfort and clarity on the team's most recent case there. The two soon realize that the past, like the present, is never quite as it may have once seemed.

This story has a lot of plot lines to follow--the mystery of Quebec's founder, the mystery of the historian's murder, the case in Three Pines, and the recent case which left Gamache and Beauvoir so wounded--so many that I think the impact of each is dulled. As you move through the book, you learn a little about each plot line at a time, meaning that at times it does not even feel like you are progressing, rather taking four steps to the side before moving forward. I do, however, love how unabashedly Canadian this book is. I loved learning about the tense situation between languages spoken in Quebec, and I loved getting a glimpse of Canadian history (the good, the bad, and the ugly) through the Louise Penny's lens. This is an interesting story; it is just a lot.