Bury Your Dead, by Louise Penny, $24.99. The reader gets three stories for the price of one in this emotional and absorbing sixth installment in the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series. Gamache, who is recuperating from injuries during a visit to Quebec City during Winter Carnival, is drawn into the investigation of the murder of an elderly and slightly mad scholar who was searching for the grave of the city’s founder, Samuel de Champlain.
Meanwhile, he’s asked his assistant, Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir, to return to the village of Three Pines where Olivier, the owner of the local bistro, had been arrested for murder at the end of “A Brutal Telling.”
Something about that case never added up, for either Gamache or many readers. And as the two investigations unfold, so too (but in flashback) do the events of another case in which both Gamache and Beauvoir were injured in an attempt to thwart a terrorist plot in which nothing went as it should have.
We were among those not satisfied with the ending of “A Brutal Telling,” but it’s now clear — as we suspected — that the mystery was far from over at book’s end, and its shocking final solution here is brilliantly conceived and executed.
It’s always good to return to Three Pines and its eccentric citizens, but here we have a bonus locale: the historic walled city of Quebec in winter, so intensely cold that stepping outdoors brings tears to your eyes, a place full of history where French and English coexist, albeit somewhat uneasily, with each other.
The Insane Train, by Sheldon Russell, $25.99
Hook Runyon, a one-armed railroad security guard in the years just following World War II, is given an assignment that will make or break his cherished career as a yard dog.
When much of the Baldwin Insane Asylum in Barstow, Calif., is destroyed by a suspicious fire, its director decides to relocate the facility to Oklahoma, and Hook is asked to provide security for the railroad journey. Among the patients are a few very dangerous criminally insane men, and with only a skeleton crew of hospital staff on board, Hook must recruit some helpers to ensure the inmates’ safe passage.
He finds them in a nearby hobo camp, a ragtag group of veterans who have fallen on hard times, and they’re joined down the line by a railroad hooker. At first leery of the job (and of Hook), they quickly establish a rapport with the patients who are, like them, damaged souls in a world that has turned its back on them. The trip proves even more dangerous than Hook, a man of quiet authority and uncommon common sense, had anticipated, for there is a killer on the train, one who might be either an inmate or a hospital staffer.
The story unfolds with the stark clarity of a Clint Eastwood movie, underscored with rough, laconic humor and driven by strong characterizations and a powerful sense of time and place.
The insights into railroad life and the treatment of the insane — not inhumane, but largely clueless — flesh out the suspenseful story line, as does the low-key romance between Hook, a complex man with an unexpected passion for collecting rare books, and a lonely, dedicated young nurse. Fresh and original, it’s easily one of the best mysteries of the year.
Christmas Mourning, By Margaret Maron, $25.99
Deborah Knott is a judge in Colleton County, a rural area in North Carolina, the youngest daughter of a bootlegger who has 11 older brothers and a vast extended family. Married for a year to sheriff’s deputy Dwight Bryant, she’s happily preparing for Christmas when the death of a teenage cheerleader in a car crash casts a pall over the proceedings. Then two wayward teenage brothers are shot to death in an apparently unrelated incident, and in her quiet way, Deborah helps her husband investigate the killings.
The 16th book in this long-running series, it’s written with the author’s usual warmth and insight, this time into the hive culture of teenagers who are always linked through their cellphones, and into the ties of family and friendship that bind people together.
Deborah, who is wise beyond her years, is as calm and compassionate in her private life as in her judicial rulings and she makes a refreshing contrast to some of the ditzy protagonists the genre has spawned lately. If you’re new to the series, the huge cast of characters is a bit daunting at first, but you’ll soon be drawn into the engaging story and the colorful regional setting.
Tom and Enid Schantz are freelancers who write regularly about new mysteries.
