Bury Your Dead

Content Warning: The source material features depictions of traumatic injury, gun violence, and misuse of opioids.

Bury Your Dead is a sweeping detective novel with multiple timelines and locations. While on one level the central preoccupation is fundamental to the genre—who committed a crime, and why—Penny also asks why individuals grieve and experience remorse, and how recovery, or its absence, can shape a person’s future.

The work opens with the reader already aware that Gamache may be facing serious consequences, as the flashback to the factory raid ends with the line: “Too late, Chief Inspector Gamache realized he’d made a mistake” (3). Immediately, Penny shifts timelines, using Reine-Marie Gamache’s anxiety to show that the family has recently experienced a profound trial. What that consists of remains mysterious, though obviously work-related and violent, as Gamache has flashbacks to gunfire and funerals. Penny thus establishes that Gamache is experiencing survivor’s guilt but does not reveal who has died. Soon after, the reader is shown Gamache’s letter from Gabri Dubeau, asking Gamache to reconsider Olivier’s guilt in the murder of the Hermit. Penny reveals that Gamache does doubt Olivier’s guilt—and, more fundamentally, his own fitness to investigate: He turns down invitations to consult on the Renaud case and realizes that only Jean-Guy can revisit the question of Olivier’s guilt. Only later, with the introduction of Paul Morin’s voice, does Penny indicate for whom Gamache is grieving—and the extent of the remorse he feels for breaking a promise to his protégé.

Though they run parallel investigations, Beauvoir and Gamache are united in their preoccupations with loss. Beauvoir feels distant and resentful of his wife, declaring that he “hated himself for hating her” (62). Gamache, while his usual pleasant self in many ways, avoids confiding in anyone about his losses and wonders if the Renaud case is simply his way of “replacing one ghost with a fresher one” (258). Beauvoir, unexpectedly, finds relief in confiding in Ruth Zardo, relieved that she “looked at him as if he were a stranger” after the first time he began to tell her the truth about the factory raid (287). In taking over Gamache’s usual role in Three Pines, Beauvoir finds community and overcomes his usual cynicism to trust others. At the same time, he and Gamache both uncover murders where guilt leads others to destroy their lives: Hancock feels powerless to save the English community, and so murders Renaud. Gamache almost admires him, saying, “their suffering hurts you, almost physically” (498). Hancock attempts to die by suicide, turning his communal guilt into self-destruction. Old Mundin’s grief for his father gives way to “hatred” for the man he believes to be his killer (456), ruining his own hopes of seeing his son grow up. Both killers are cautionary tales for their investigators, on the importance of facing grief in community rather than isolation. Gamache’s choice to watch the video with Émile underlines that he has absorbed the lesson, just as Beauvoir has by confiding in Ruth.