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92 of 95 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"I'm sorry. I was wrong. I need help. I don't know.", August 5, 2010
This review is from: Bury Your Dead (Chief Inspector Gamache, Book 6) (Hardcover)
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These were the four sentences Chief Inspector Armand Gamache had learned from his own Chief, Emile Comeau, when he was a green agent and which he passed on to each agent under his command in the Sūreté du Québec. They are sentences Gamache has found more need of than ever in the months since the events in Louise Penny's previous novel, The Brutal Telling: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel.
Not only does he have continued second thoughts about arresting and helping convict one his Three Pines friends of killing a man, but he is haunted by a recent operation that led to the violent deaths of a number of officers serving under him. One of the deaths weighs particularly heavily on his mind, as he plays back seemingly endless bits of conversation between himself and the doomed officer. Gamache is a man of extraordinary sensitivity and feeling in a job that sometimes can require nearly superhuman choices with no good endings. He knows that it takes time to heal (or at least cover over the wound), but he also knows he will always carry with him the mistakes and misjudgments he thinks led to terrible and final consequences for others and to his own sorrow of soul. No matter whether he says, "I'm sorry. I was wrong," or not, he cannot bring back the lives lost. But perhaps he, with the help of someone else in the Sūreté, can take another look at the Three Pines case...
Penny has done something I'd been hoping she would: she has written a book focused more on the police we've come to know in this series than on the villagers in Three Pines. Since I sometimes find the greed, selfishness, anger, and what-have-you of the Three Pines residents to be a little more than I'd like to stomach, I'm also pleased that Bury Your Dead: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel spends a lot of time in the old city of Québec as Gamache and his faithful dog, Henri, stay with his old boss, Emile, for a while. There, he reluctantly agrees to help the local constabulary investigate a murder at the Literary and Historical Society where he's been going to research some history.
BURY YOUR DEAD is a fabulous novel. It effortlessly intertwines three plots: the two geographically separated murder cases going on in real time and, in retrospective, the disastrous Canadian police operation that left dead and near dead in its wake. Gamache's probing in Québec City examines (without being pretentiously didactic) the tensions between the Anglophones and the Francophones, it delves into the Battle of the Plains of Abraham which shaped the destiny of the beautiful old metropolis, and it searches for answers to the mystery of where founding father Champlain might be buried. To say too much about the plot dims the satisfaction of reading this splendid work, so I'll say no more, except to note that toward the end a careful reader can savor the emotion, the psychological insights, and the often beautiful language but also look beyond them to ask questions about a few apparent plot inconsistencies. But overall, I'd say this is Penny's best book to date, and it doesn't require full knowledge of the previous novels to be accessible.
Penny advises that "BURY YOUR DEAD is not about death, but about life." Absolutely. But it teaches about life through death. Especially poignant and heartbreaking are the unforgettable scenes when Gamache can't forget his brave, slain subordinate and comrade. The last scene leaves an unforgettable certainty about who these two respectively are and were. Don't miss BURY YOUR DEAD. (4.7 stars)
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47 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Three Pines revisited, October 23, 2010
This review is from: Bury Your Dead (Chief Inspector Gamache, Book 6) (Hardcover)
In keeping with my usual personal policy, I will skip a synopsis of this book; I assume readers of this review will have picked that up from the numerous reviews elsewhere. This, then, is just my opinion.
I've been a big fan of Louise Penny since her first book, Still Life, which I adored. I've read every installment in the series and enjoyed all of them with a particular fondness for last year's The Brutal Telling.
In this sixth outing starring Surete de Quebec Inspector Armand Gamache the author undertakes something I don't think I've seen done in a mystery novel before: the intertwining of three distinctively different stories. And I'm not sure I really want to see it done again...
Although she did this exceedingly well, I found it somewhat distracting. Interestingly, this is the October choice of my online book group and we don't seem to have focused on the same story line, some of us preferring one over the other and others the third. However, I wouldn't for a minute consider not reading her next book -- I am simply too invested in Gamache and the residents of Three Pines, all of whom have such distinctive personalities, to walk away from them any time soon. Or ever, for that matter.
A word of warning: readers absolutely MUST read The Brutal Telling before reading Bury Your Dead. Although there are enough of the main points given in this book to cover the highlights of the previous installment, you will never get the full import of what the author has done in book six without a fuller understanding of the background.
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27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Another Great Read in the Three Pines Series, August 21, 2010
This review is from: Bury Your Dead (Chief Inspector Gamache, Book 6) (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I am reviewing the Advance Readers' Edition.
I have all of Louise Penny's Three Pines mysteries, and also reviewed the penultimate in the series, "The Brutal Telling". With the latest, "Bury Your Dead", I think the series has changed its name to the Armand Gamache or Inspector Gamache series, after the Quebecois Chief Inspector who leads the action. The town of Three Pines appears in "Bury Your Dead", but it is not the center of the action.
At times in this series, Gamache's always-patient, always wise-as-an-owl persona gets just a little annoying (though not enough to keep me from giving the books five stars). I didn't feel this annoyance in "Bury Your Dead". Yes, Gamache still has his head screwed on right and lives and reacts with dignity (though not standing on his dignity). But it wasn't beaten to death in the telling of the tale.
Louise Penny does a masterful, and I mean masterful, job of intertwining three stories. 1) Why was an eccentric killed in the basement of the Literary and Historical Society Building, in the old walled city of Quebec, while Gamache was visiting, no less. 2) Did Gamache (and the prosecutor) make a mistake when they nailed a certain Three Pines resident as the murderer in "The Brutal Telling". 3) How can Gamache heal from the heartbreak and guilt of a kidnapping gone wrong, which happened before "Bury Your Dead" opens (and during the six months since the action of "The Brutal Telling").
Penny writes very intelligent books. You aren't just given a mystery, you are made interested in arcane historical questions that you didn't even know could be important. Gamache's personality is central to the feel and tone. Here's Gamache, displeased with a police officer's crassness in light of the discovered murder: "This officer wasn't his to train in the etiquette of the recently dead, in the respect necessary when in their presence. In the empathy necessary to see the victim as a person, and the muderer as a person. It wasn't with cynicism and sarcasm, with dark humor and crass comments a killer was caught. He was caught by seeing and thinking and feeling. Crude comments didn't make the path clearer or the interpretation of evidence easier. Indeed, they obscured the truth, with fear."
The point being, not to preach, but to show how difficult it is for a police officer, who sees so much of the underbelly and darkness, to keep that respectful human-ness.
Penny's mysteries unfold in a leisurely pace. If you need a thriller mile-a-minute pace, these books will encourage you to slow down and smell the (dead?!) roses.
I thought this was a marvelous book and recommend it highly. But if you can, I recommend that you buy it along with "The Brutal Telling" and read them in order. As the first's murder carries forward into the second, you'll have a much richer experience if you've read them both. In addition, "The Brutal Telling" will be spoiled for you if you read "Bury Your Dead" first!
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