Joe Gunther Series by Mayor, Archer
Joe Gunther #3
Scent of Evil
Mayor, Archer
When the body of a fast-living young stockbroker is found in a shallow
grave, suspicion first falls on a cuckolded policeman. Lt. Joe Gunther
investigates the increasingly bizarre details of the crime, but finds
that he’s too far behind events to prevent a second murder. Indeed,
whoever is responsible always seems to be a few steps ahead, as if
there’s a leak on the force. Sweltering August heat does nothing to calm
the increasingly agitated town selectmen, who demand results.
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Joe Gunther #4
The Skeleton's Knee
Mayor, Archer
When a reclusive market gardener's death proves to stem from a 20
year-old bullet wound, Lt. 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 duffle of
unmarked bills and a body buried in the garden patch suggests that
Fuller had motives beyond misanthropy. Nor is it such a cold case
either, as someone seems willing to kill to ensure that old secrets
remain buried.
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Joe Gunther #5
Fruits of the Poisonous Tree
Mayor, Archer
Gail Zigman, town selectwoman and Joe Gunther's companion of many years,
is raped, and the detective 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 the trail
of evidence.
Every lead seems to point to a single, obvious suspect, but is the
evidence too perfect? Risking his friendship with Gail, the respect of
his peers, and his own life, Lt. Gunther keeps digging, hoping to find
out if the man they have in jail is rightly there, or if the evidence
against him is tainted—"fruits of the poisonous tree."
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Joe Gunther #6
The Dark Root
Mayor, Archer
A brutal home invasion shocks Brattleboro's small Asian community, but
no one's talking. Undeterred, Joe Gunther digs deeper and discovers a
cross-border smuggling route carrying drugs, contraband, and illegal
aliens into and out of Canada. Operating below the radar for years,
competition between underworld rivals is bringing it into the light with
deadly consequences. International jurisdiction is a complicated thing,
and Gunther will have to collaborate with the FBI, the Border Patrol
and the Mounties in the pursuit of justice.
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Joe Gunther #7
The Ragman's Memory
Mayor, Archer
A small girl brings Joe Gunther a bird’s nest—made partially of human
hair. In the search to put a body, and an identity, to the hair’s owner,
Joe comes upon an unexplained death, a grisly murder, and a sudden
disappearance. All seem to be entangled in a puzzling web of municipal
corruption, blackmail, and industrial espionage. A shell-shocked World
War II vet nicknamed “The Ragman” may hold the key to it all, if Joe can
get him to talk before the murderer strikes again.
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Joe Gunther #8
Bellows Falls
Mayor, Archer
Joe Gunther is seconded to the neighboring town of Bellows Falls to
investigate harassment allegations against a fellow officer. What begins
as a seemingly open-and-shut case comes to look more and more like a
frame job as Gunther doggedly pursues the truth, and soon he finds
himself feeling around the edges of a statewide drug distribution
network. As always, Vermont itself is a major character in Mayor's
writing, with Bellows Falls standing in for any number of slowly
decaying once-proud mill towns.
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Joe Gunther #10
Occam's Razor
Mayor, Archer
The body was positioned so that the train neatly obliterated its head
and hands. Dressed in a homeless man's clothes with empty pockets, it
might easily be passed-off as an unfortunate John Doe. And yet… Joe
Gunther has a knack for knowing when things don't quite add up, and the
math in this case is all kinds of wrong. Add a toxic waste dumping
scheme, a stabbing, and a whole lot of state politics… if Occam's razor
were applied to Gunther's caseload, how many incisions would it make?
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Joe Gunther #11
The Marble Mask
Mayor, Archer
Joe Gunther, a Brattleboro, Vermont, cop, is the head of the new Vermont
Bureau of Investigation (VBI), a joint task force charged with
statewide responsibility for major crimes. 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. Some of the more
interesting minor characters in author Archer Mayor's long-running
series about the amiable elder sleuth make return appearances here as
Joe's teammates--like one-armed Willy, a former wife-beater who's now
playing footsie with Sammie Martens, one of Joe's favorite colleagues.
When the frozen stiff turns out to be a (formerly) 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 Sûreté,
and the local cops in Sherbrooke, where Deschamps's son Marcel is
involved in a turf war with the Hell's Angels and a rival gang of thugs.
Old secrets and intrigues come to light while an intricate plan to
frame a dying man for a crime half a century old forms an interesting
puzzle that's not fully revealed until the last couple of pages.
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Joe Gunther #12
Tucker Peak
Mayor, Archer
An overworked sheriff and a string of condo burglaries at a luxurious
ski resort have Lt. Joe Gunther and the newly-minted Vermont Bureau of
Investigation digging deep for clues. But it doesnt take long for Joe to
find the most likely thief missingand his girlfriend dead. As the
complications mount, from drug dealing to environmental terrorism to
attempted murder, Joe and his team go undercover to infiltrate the
closed society of a one-company town, populated by bored millionaires
and supported by a small legion of resort employees, not all of whom are
what they seem.
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Joe Gunther #14
Gatekeeper
Mayor, Archer
Vermont detective Joe Gunther vows to stop the flow of drugs into his
beloved state 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 political
bigwigs dies of an overdose.
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Joe Gunther #16
St. Albans Fire
Mayor, Archer
With Joe Gunther and his Vermont Bureau of Investigation team spread
thin on assignment everywhere, from the remote dairy county of Northwest
Vermont to the slums of Newark, NJ, they're pushed to their absolute
limit when a string of serial arsons across the Green Mountain State
evolve into the most shocking series of murders the bucolic region has
ever known.
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Joe Gunther #24
Three Can Keep a Secret
Mayor, Archer
Joe Gunther and his team—the Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI)—are
usually called in on major cases by local Vermont enforcement whenever
they need expertise and back-up. But after the state is devastated by
Hurricane Irene, the police from one end of the state are taxed to their
limits, leaving Joe Gunther involved in an odd, seemingly unrelated
series of cases. In the wake of the hurricane, a seventeen year old
gravesite is exposed, revealing a coffin that had been filled with rocks
instead of the expected remains. At the same time, an old,
retired state politician turns up dead at his high-end nursing home, in
circumstances that leave investigators unsure that he wasn’t murdered.
And a patient who calls herself The Governor has walked away from a
state mental facility during the post-hurricane flood. It turns out that
she was indeed once “Governor for a Day,” over forty years ago, but
that she might have also been falsely committed and drugged to keep her
from revealing something that she saw all those years ago. Amidst the
turmoil and the disaster relief, it’s up to Joe Gunther and his team to
learn what really happened with the two corpses—one missing—and what
secret “The Governor” might have still locked in her brain that links
them all.
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