Showing results by author "Archer Mayor" in All Categories

Wayne Castine was found brutally murdered and the murderer remains at large. Castine, a suspected child predator, was killed in Brattleboro where he was involved with a tangled network of an extended family living in a local trailer park. Any member of the clan would have had the opportunity to kill him, and, as he was involved with both the mother and her 12 year old daughter, reason to commit the murder.

A 40-year-old skeleton is found encased in a concrete slab at a recently decommissioned nuclear energy site. It becomes a case for the Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI) and its leader, Joe Gunther, since they have the resources and the ability to investigate an old, very cold, missing persons case that has now been reclassified as murder. The victim was Hank Mitchell, and Gunther must chase down old rumors and speculations.

In Northwestern Vermont, young Bobby Cutts enters the family barn and encounters a nightmare. Surrounded by bolts of fire, Bobby and the entire herd perish in a stampeding circle of flames. Called to the scene to investigate, Joe Gunther instantly recognizes arson. But by whom? And why? Gunther quickly discovers that someone is wreaking havoc across the bucolic farmlands surrounding the town of St. Albans.

Over the years investigator Joe Gunther has battled drug pushers and corporate swindlers, grappled with environmental conspirators, and foiled gangs and home invaders. But while usually successful, Gunther hasn't always come out on top. Thirty years earlier, store owner Klaus Oberfeldt was robbed and beaten senseless. Gunther, distracted by his wife's losing struggle with cancer in the same hospital where Klaus was slipping from life, did something that would plague him for the rest of his career: He let the case go cold, burying it in the past along with his private sorrows.

The harrowing call comes from the NYPD: Willy's ex-wife Mary has been found dead in her Lower East Side apartment, and Willy is asked to identify the body. Torn from his beloved Vermont, Willy returns to the city of his hard-drinking youth with misgivings that deepen when he sees Mary's sad corpse on a gurney. Because of a fresh puncture mark in her arm, the police think she overdosed. But Willy has doubts. Driven by loss and guilt, Willy searches deeper and deeper into his past, to a long-ago Vietnam where he was a merciless loner known as the Sniper.

During the height of a particularly brutal Vermont winter, a woman's body is found one morning hanging high above the interstate. The woman, found with the word dyke carved on her chest, is quickly determined to be the victim of a brutal murder. That alone is enough to bring in Joe Gunther and his Vermont Bureau of Investigation team.

When a reclusive market gardener's death proves to stem from a 20-year-old bullet wound, Lieutenant Joe Gunther is presented with a very cold homicide to solve. But who was the victim exactly? A deeply private man eking out an ascetic existence from a hardscrabble mountain field, Abraham Fuller was virtually unknown to his neighbors, in the manner of someone pursuing more than mere solitude. The discovery of a bag full of unmarked bills and a body buried in the garden patch suggests that Fuller had motives beyond misanthropy.

Joe Gunther, a Brattleboro, Vermont cop, is the head of the new Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI). In The Marble Mask, the VBI's first case takes the force north to Stowe, where a 50-year-old corpse has turned up in a crevasse on Mt. Mansfield. When the frozen stiff turns out to have been a big-time Canadian crime boss named Jean Deschamps who disappeared after World War II, Joe and his gang cross the border to work with the Mounties, the Surete, and the local cops in Sherbrooke.

News travels fast in the small state of Vermont. In this tight-knit society, police officers and investigators proudly maintain a kinship that transcends the boundaries of their jurisdictions. When an unidentified body is found in the peaceful town of Brattleboro, local police and the Vermont Bureau of Investigation both appear at the scene. But before investigator Joe Gunther can begin to gather evidence of murder, a family emergency sends him to his hometown, where the lives of his mother and brother have suddenly been threatened.

When, in the course of a week, a young heroin addict is gunned down while trying to rob a convenience store, a narcotics dealer is found hanging from a bridge, and the granddaughter of a political bigwig dies of an overdose, Vermont detective Joe Gunther vows to stop the flow of drugs into his beloved state.

When a local quarry yields a garroted body with bad dental work and toes tattooed in Cyrillic, Joe Gunther figures it's a Russian Mafia killing, rare as that might be in Vermont. But it's so very...tidy. So very...professional. Then the CIA calls, inviting Gunther down to Washington for some friendly "assistance" with his case. Suddenly he's caught up in a shadowy game of cross and double-cross.

An apparent accidental death turns out to be only the first of many murders. Ben Kendall was a troubled man. Coming back from Vietnam with PTSD and scars that no one else could see, he hid away from the world, filling his house with an ever-increasing amount of stuff, until finally the piles collapsed and he was found dead, crushed beneath his own belongings. But what on first glance looks to be the tragic accidental death of a hoarder maybe something much more - and much deadlier

When Gail Zigman, town selectwoman and Joe Gunther's companion of many years, is raped, Gunther finds himself caught between the media, local politicians, and a network of well-meaning victims' rights advocates as he tries to put his own feelings aside and follow a trail of evidence. Every lead points to a single obvious suspect, but is the evidence too perfect?

Joe Gunther is sent to the neighboring town of Bellows Falls to investigate harassment allegations against a fellow officer. But as Gunther doggedly pursues the truth, what begins as a seemingly open-and-shut case starts to look more and more like a frame job, and he soon finds himself feeling around the edges of a statewide drug distribution network.