Bury Your Dead is the sixth episode in the Armand Gamache/Three Pines series. The series is set in the Eastern Townships region of rural Quebec, southeast of Montreal and just north of Vermont. Armand Gamache works for the Surete du Quebec, the provincial police force based in Montreal, and he often investigates crimes that occur in or around the remote village of Three Pines.

This time, though, the main storyline takes place in Old Quebec City. Something bad has happened to Armand in the months since we last left him. Something terrible and awful has happened to him and to the members of his Surete team. We don't know what the event was. We just know that it's something they have all had to recuperate from, both mentally and physically. And it seems as though the healing process will continue to take time and effort.

Armand and his German shepherd Henri have come to Old Quebec City to visit with old friend and mentor Emile Comeau. It's early February, the time of the Winter Carnival, and the weather is snowy and cold. Armand takes the opportunity to relax a bit and to do research in the Literary and Historical Society, the English language library that is housed in a 200-year-old jail building. (It is also known in real life as the Morrin Centre.) And when the body of Augustin Renard is found in the "Lit and His" basement, Armand naturally gets drawn into the investigation. Renard was a local man who had been obsessed by the mythology surrounding French explorer and Quebec founder Samuel Champlain, whose final resting place has never been located and memorialized. Did Renard go to his grave, searching for Champlain's? Is there another, much older body down that basement? Or were other circumstances at work in Renard's murder? These are the kinds of puzzles that Armand is good at solving.

At the same time, prodded by insistent daily letters from Gabri Dubeau, Armand is having second thoughts about the case of "The Hermit" that wrapped up in Three Pines some months beforehand. (See The Brutal Telling, the previous book in the series.) Did the real killer land in jail? Or did Armand and the court system get it wrong? Armand asks his ever-amusing second-in-command officer Jean Guy Beauvoir to return to Three Pines and casually reopen the case -- unofficially. Until now Beauvoir has had the buffer of the Chief Inspector to stand between him and the townspeople. This is his chance to get to know and to interact with them himself, whether he wants to or not. Maybe his view of the residents will soften with this opportunity. He enlists the help of some of the usual villagers, including artist Clara Morrow, to think of alternative suspects and motives. We can only hope that in the end, both murders will be resolved to everyone's satisfaction.

But the bad thing is never far from the minds of Armand and Jean Guy. What happened to them in "the factory" haunts them and intrudes on their daily lives. Both go through the self-torture of rewinding portions of that fateful day, rehashing what happened, and wondering how they could have reacted differently. As a result, we readers begin to reconstruct the full picture, bits and pieces at a time. Louise Penny has given us a gift here. Instead of creating a separate book where the drama of the factory raid can unfold in real time, she lets Armand and Jean Guy reveal the truth to us themselves, as they remember it. They are human too, after all. They have feelings and memories, guilts and regrets. What a terrific writing strategy! Penny referenced another past police incident in a smaller way, through occasional mentions of "the Arnot case," in the first three books of the series (Still Life, A Fatal Grace and The Cruelest Month). But this time the story is a much darker one, a more tragic one. It also brings controversial Surete agent Yvette Nichol back into action.

As usual, with a Louise Penny novel: just when we think we know what really happened, she and Armand Gamache point us in another direction entirely, with only a few pages or paragraphs to go. How does she think of these outcomes? Her techniques and her wonderful way of storytelling are what keep us reading, page after page, book after book.

She teaches us about Quebec and its history, too. Who knew Champlain's grave was unidentified? And many visitors to Old Quebec City may not even know about the Literary and Historical Society collection at the Morrin Centre. I've been fortunate enough to have been inside, and I highly recommend touring it. She also reminds us that harsh winters are something Quebec residents must learn to endure. The second book in the series, A Fatal Grace, is also set in winter. We get chills, just reading about Armand and Henri going out in the snow and bitter cold temperatures.

Bury Your Dead is a participatory mystery novel that you won't want to miss, especially if you've read any of the five previous books in the series. If you read The Brutal Telling, then you must read this one. And from this point on, you should read the rest of the series in order. All of them. This book also offers the writer's lesson of how to allow one's characters to develop and to tell a story, naturally. Bravo, Louise Penny!