ABSTRACT
Louise Penny’s enormously popular Three Pines series (2005–present) combines the sensibilities of the police procedural with those of the modern-day utopia. This chapter focuses on Bury Your Dead (2010), the sixth novel of the series, to trace the potentials of Penny’s project to comment meaningfully on the power structures that underlie—and might be subverted in—life in the Anthropocene. By juxtaposing the historical vibrancy of very real Quebec City with the Edenic stillness of fictional Three Pines, Penny examines the tenuousness of both time and place in constructions of reality, a move that demonstrates the power of crime fiction to interrogate the most pressing sociocultural and philosophical concerns of the twenty-first century.
