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A Joe Gunther Mystery
by Archer MayorFrom the book jacket:
Winter is on the wane in northwestern
Vermont. The moon hangs bright and cold in
the silvery night sky over hundreds of
square miles of a peaceful, dormant
landscape of dairy farms. Young Bobby Cutts
enters the family barn to tend to the beasts
within…and encounters a nightmare. Suddenly
surrounded by bolts of fire, Bobby and the
entire herd perish in a stampeding, hellish
circle of flames.
Called to the scene to investigate, Joe
Gunther instantly recognizes arson. But by
whom? And for what possible reason? There is
little insurance, the family is loving and
tightly knit, and there are few neighborhood
animosities.
Yet murder this is, and Gunther quickly
discovers that someone is wreaking havoc
across the bucolic farmlands surrounding the
town of St. Albans. Somewhere in the dense
social fabric of the community, in the
hearts and souls of Bobby's family, and in
the cutthroat farming business underneath
the region's placid exterior are the truths
Joe Gunther and his team must ferret out.
But what looked like a local case is about
to take them from the barns of Vermont to
the gritty streets of Newark, New Jersey.
Comment: Joe Gunther made his first
appearance in Open Season (1988) as a
police lieutenant in Vermont. 16 books
later he's still in Vermont (but now second
in command) and still solving crimes by "quietly,
relentlessly stripping away the veneer to
reveal motives like envy and rancor,
disappointment and bitterness."
Unfortunately he's pretty dense when it
comes to figuring out his own relationships,
and his long-time relationship with State
Senator Gail Zigman is on the rocks, so the
question is not so much whether Joe will
catch the killer, but whether he will lose a
lover......
As Kirkus Reviews so aptly puts it,
"the most understated cop in crime fiction
racks up a satisfying 16th in a series that
marches confidently to its own unhurried
beat." - Kirkus Reviews.
This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in November 2005, and has been updated for the
October 2006 edition.
Click here to go to this issue.
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