"Bury Your Dead" by Louise Penny Awarded 2011 Best Novel Anthony Award

Congratulations to Louise Penny, winner of the 2011 Best Novel Anthony Award for Bury Your Dead.

Louise Penny also received the 2011 Best Mystery Novel Macavity award for Bury Your Dead.

The Anthony Awards are given at each annual Bouchercon World Mystery Convention with the winners selected by attendees. The award is named for the late Anthony Boucher (William Anthony Parker White), well-known writer and critic from the New York Times, who helped found the Mystery Writers of America. This year's Bouchercon was held September 15-18 right here in St. Louis.

Bury Your Dead has also won the Arthur Ellis for Best Crime Novel in Canada and the Agatha for the Best Mystery in the United States, as well as the Dilys, as the book the mystery bookstores most enjoyed selling in 2010.

Bury Your Dead was also been nominated for the Barry Award presented at Bouchercon, and the Nero Award, presented annually by the Wolfe Pack for the best American Mystery written in the tradition of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories.

From Louise Penny's official web site:

This sixth Gamache mystery is set partly in the tiny fictional (and oddly murderous) village of Three Pines, in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. But most of the action takes place in Quebec City. A vibrant, sophisticated fortress city, which lives in the present but guards its past.

It's February and bitterly cold in Quebec City. But Chief Inspector Gamache barely notices. He's nearly consumed with grief and guilt over a police action he led -- and the mistakes he made. He spends his time with his now-retired mentor, and in the peaceful library of the Literary and Historical Society. A bastion of the dwindling English population.

But if Gamache thought death was finished with him, he was wrong. The body of a celebrated eccentric is found in the Lit and His, and Gamache is drawn again into hunting a murderer. The victim is an amateur archeologist who was monomaniacal in his pursuit. He had spent his life trying to find the body of Samuel de Champlain.

As Chief Inspector Gamache digs through the crime and the venerable old city it becomes clear the murder is rooted in a 400 year old mystery, and in people long dead. But perhaps not buried.

It also becomes clear to the Chief Inspector that to find the truth he needs to confront his own ghosts, and bury his own dead.