Bury Your Dead

The platonic ideal of a Louise Penny reading experience is under a blanket by the fire on a snowy day, nibbling a sandwich of brie, fig jam, and prosciutto on a crusty baguette. Penny’s Three Pines mysteries are appealingly cozy, never short on sumptuous descriptions of meals, and populated by a cast of charming oddballs in the fictional Canadian town, including a foulmouthed elderly poet with a pet duck, a psychologist turned bookstore owner, and Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, the lead detective in each tale. In 2010’s Bury Your Dead, the sixth Chief Inspector Gamache book, the detective is haunted by a fatal error he made in a previous mission as he tries to solve the murder of a historian in Québec City, all while sending his second-in-command back to Three Pines to reinvestigate a murder case that tangled up one of the town’s beloved bistro owners. “I created characters whose company I would enjoy, I created a main character who I would marry, I created a village I would love to live in,” Penny told TIME in 2015. Lucky for all the readers who get to spend time with them, too, in Bury Your Dead and the 17 other books in the Three Pines series. —Tessa Berenson Rogers

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