That was the danger. Not that betrayals happened, not that cruel things happened, but that they could outweigh all the good. That we could forget the good and only remember the bad. [loc. 5220]
Bury Your Dead is the most complex and the most compelling of the Gamache novels that I've read to date. There are three strands, at least, to the story. Gamache is staying with his old mentor in Quebec, recovering (physically, mentally and emotionally) from an operation that ended tragically. Insomniac and tormented by memories, it's with a sense of relief that he finds himself involved in a murder, a body buried in the cellar of 'the Literary and Historical Society, that bastion of Anglo Quebéc'. The dead man, Augustin Renaud, had been obsessed with finding the grave of Samuel de Champlain, founder of Quebéc and focus of the separatist movement.
In parallel to this are Gamache's memories of a shoot-out in an abandoned factory, and those who died under his command: but not until the very end of the novel does everything about that operation become clear. And meanwhile, in Three Pines, Jean Guy Beauvoir is continuing investigation of the murder case that was the focus of The Brutal Telling, talking to the villagers, being assailed by Ruth Zardo's poetry, and discovering the truth -- or something closer to it -- about who murdered an elderly man deep in the woods.
That Penny keeps all these plots balanced, clear and engaging is laudable in itself: that she also shows us Gamache's guilt and sorrow over his failure to save his colleagues, and evokes wintry Quebec and the close-knit community of the Lit and His, is virtuosic. It was good to see Gamache's second-in-command, Beauvoir, out of Gamache's shadow: and to see sullen Agent Nichols saving the day.
I am very tempted to read my way through the whole series now (especially as I've accidentally encountered some spoilers for future novels): but it's not as though I have nothing else to read...
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