Bury Your Dead

It is Winter Carnival in Quebec City, bitterly cold and surpassingly beautiful. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté de Quebec has come not to celebrate but to recover from a harrowing investigation gone wrong that left one of his team members dead.  But murder seems to follow Gamache everywhere, even to the seemingly peaceful Literary and Historical Society, one of the last bastions of English culture in Quebec, where a man in found dead in the basement.  And not any man--but the famous Augustin Roy, who had carried his obsessive search for the long-lost body of the founder of Quebec, Samuel de Champlain, all the way to the Society library.  Badly injured himself and desperately in need of a rest, Gamache cannot resist the appeals of the police and the Society board alike to negotiate the treacherous ground between the English and the French in the old walled city.

Meanwhile, Gamache receives a letter each day from the little town of Three Pines, where the beloved Bistro owner Olivier was found guilty of murdering a mysterious hermit in THE BRUTAL TELLING. "Why would Olivier move the body?" Olivier's partner Gabri writes every time. "It doesn't make sense.  He didn't do it, you know."  Even though the evidence against Olivier seemed overwhelming at the time, Gamache sends his deputy, Inspector Beauvoir, back to Three Pines to be sure that nothing was overlooked....

Through it all, as he and Beauvoir search for the truth about present and past murders, Gamache must relive the terrible events that killed one of his men before he can begin to bury his dead.