Bury Your Dead (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series)

By Louise Penny

Rating: 5/5 Stairs

I did a Top Ten Tuesday recently where I declared that I don’t have to review every book I read here on this blog. It’s okay to just do a quick Goodreads rating sometimes, and not let the book reviews sit and pile up. Initially, Bury Your Dead was a book that I planned to just review in Goodreads, as it is not a recent publication, not won in a giveaway, not an ARC for review. But Bury Your Dead was just so wonderful, I felt I had to do a quick mini review here at Hidden Staircase to share this book with you all.

This is the sixth book in the Gamache series, and my favorite one so far by a mile. Wow.

If you haven’t read any Gamache, don’t start with this book. To really enjoy this book, you need to have at least read the fifth book, The Brutal Telling, first. Bury Your Dead has three storylines going on, and one of them is a continuation from The Brutal Telling. Ideally, I would say read all five books before Bury Your Dead just to have that background on the characters, Gamache’s team of investigators, and the people of Three Pines. You won’t be disappointed.

Bury Your Dead is beautifully written. We begin the book with a broken Gamache. An incident response went horribly wrong, and Gamache lost some of his investigative team. He is on leave, visiting his mentor in Quebec City. As Gamache investigates a murder that he’s stumbled upon in Quebec City, his second in command Jean-Guy finds himself back in Three Pines to revisit their investigation into the death of the hermit from the last book. As the two men move forward in their investigations, they continue to have flashbacks of the recent incident. Through the flashbacks, the reader slowly learns exactly what happened, the mistakes made, and the heartaches caused.

The build-up to the conclusion is breathtaking. When we finally have the whole picture from the last moments of the incident, I found myself holding my breath and in tears as I listened to the narrator. It was so powerful. This story, Gamache’s healing process, and Jean-Guy’s realization that he does love Three Pines is truly so moving. Like I said at the beginning – hands down, my favorite in this series. Wow. I just had to let you all know.

2018 Reading Challenge: A book about death or grief.