“Bury Your Dead” - Louise Penny

 (C.I. Gamache book 6)

🎞️ IMO this is Penny’s most inspired novel yet (in the Gamache series). 4+ mysteries (depending on how you count them) are unravelling simultaneously in this novel; 1 mystery dates back to the founding of Quebec itself. Fascinating stuff!

🎞️ The beautiful fortress city - Quebec City - is almost a character in and of itself. Penny brings the history of QC alive along with all its modern quaintness with every alley and side street hearkening back to the past. Her descriptions of “the magnificent gilded church” conveys the grandeur of the Notre-Dame Basilica, and she precisely describes the grand staircase of the Chateau Frontenac.

🎞️ BYD returns to the last case - a life-altering tragedy having occurred in between then and now. Gamache sojourns with his old mentor to mentally recover from the terrible events. Although he very much wants to stay away from crimes and mysteries, an ancient mystery and a modern death, draw him in inexorably. At times, the conclusion seemed obvious - all evidence pointed to it. Yet, both Gamache and the reader are deeply unsettled somehow.

🎞️ I never find myself disagreeing with Gamache on much. He is, after all, a saintly crime genius with a flare for understanding human nature. But from the earliest novel, I was fretting alongside Jean-Guy regarding Gamache’s approach to Yvette Nichol. We shall learn one way or the other, if Gamache or Beauvoir was correct in their assessment. But I think Nichol is intended to emphasize that most humans aren’t fully one way or another, she represents the murky grey area of human nature.

🎞️ Penny delves deeply into the history of the Quebecois. She details the great battles lost by the French (“Je me souviens”) yet it is the Anglophones who remained in QC that became a tiny and isolated minority. I love the parallel Gamache draws between his own miscalculation and that of Montcalm, the French general at the Battle of Quebec.

🎞️ A side note that was of particular interest to me, was the appearance of the mummy of Ramses I in this narrative. Emory University’s Carlos Museum acquired the royal remains from the Niagara Falls  museum, but at the time of acquisition, the mummy’s identity was unknown. Following some rather fascinating research by University scholars and even the medical school, the identity of the mysterious royal mummy was identified as Ramses I. [See the attached link for more details about this fascinating discovery: https://www.emory.edu/EMORY_REPORT/erarchive/2002/July/erJuly.22/7_22_02mummy.html ]

I was lucky enough to visit the exhibition “Ramesses I: Science and the Search for the Lost Pharaoh” at the Carlos back in 2003. We knew that the remains were then going to be repatriated by the University. Last November, while visiting the amazing, new National Museum of the Egypt Civilization in Cairo, I had a second opportunity to see the mummy of Ramses I in its new home.

🎞️ BYD is definitely my favorite book in the series thus far because of the equal attention given to both past and present.