Archer Mayor

(1992) Third installment has Joe and his Brattleboro PD investigating the murder of someone partially buried. Book is not the best but the author is one I will continue to follow.KIRKUS: An honorable failure in which the author's forensic expertise, plain-speaking, and love of Vermont don't quite compensate for a plot that falls apart three quarters of the way through. Brattleboro's Lt. Joe Gunther (Borderlines; Open Season) must decide whether all the clues leading to alcoholic cop John Woll as the murderer of Johnny-come-lately Wall Street investor Charlie Jardine are real or a setup¥and if he didn't kill him, who did? To complicate matters, there's an information leak in the police department; the media is making a three-ring circus of the case; and several more are killed before Gunther can check out their ties to Jardine, whose chief mourner seems to be Woll's wife. Shoot- outs, secret meetings, and a police stakeout in the high school come into play before Gunther, several steps behind the reader, can lock up the case. The most vivid writing details the collapse of a heart wall during emergency bullet-removal, and Mayor's strength remains his lucid explanations of high-tech forensics. But neither can carry a story with an all-too-identifiable villain and flimsy clues. A miss, then, but still an author to be reckoned with.Pub Date: June 1, 1992ISBN: 0-89296-471-5Page Count: 368… (more)

(1990) Joe is detoured off of an assignment to help with the case of a near cult where a fire kills 5 of its members and then another murder of a father of one of the cult members. Pretty good Vermont series. KIRKUS:A solid, ingratiating follow-up to Open Season, with all of that first book's plusses--Vermont topography rendered with map-precision; crusty protagonist, Joe Gunther, here on leave from the Brattleboro force; the forensic sciences, front and center. On temporary assignment in the tiny hamlet of Gannet, where he lived for a time with his gruff uncle Buster, Gunther finds the New Englanders upset by some interlopers--the Natural Order, a sexually loose band of cultists headed by autocratic environmentalist Edward Sarris. When a suspicious fire kills five cult members, the prime suspect is Brace Wingate, who threatened them when they wouldn't release his daughter Julie. Other possibilities include: Paul Gorman, a cult deprogrammer; a Gannet restauranteur, the feisty Greta, whose business was going under due to the Kingdom (cult) health-food cafe; Rennie Wilson, who was blackmailing Sarris; and one of Julie's lovers--but which one? Two murders follow before Gunther and assorted forensic specialists reconstruct the fire scene, as well as the boot and car tracks leading to a certain rendezvous, but not before the the formerly slumbering Gannet lumbers into a new decade of progress--and greed. A cool, dispassionate narrative style contrasts with the intense emotion and gruesome body assaults, to chilling effect. A powerful series--and this is only book two.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 1990ISBN: N/APage Count: -Publisher: Putnam… (more)