Archer Mayor

A hermit dies in the hospital of a bullet he received twenty years earlier. At his mountaintop home, a skeleton with a bullet hole and a metal knee is found buried in the yard. On the way to the medical examiner's office, the hearse comes under machine gun fire. A long-hidden crime is obviously very much on someone's mind - someone who would love to destroy what little evidence remains. The serial number on the metal knee takes Joe Gunther to Chicago,...

The arson death of a young farmer leads officer Joe Gunther from rural Vermont to the gritty streets of Newark, New Jersey and face-to-face with a most deadly opponent.

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...

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...

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 in his fight for the future of the small town of Brattleboro, Vermont, Gunther hasn't always come out on top. Thirty years earlier, store owner Klaus Oberfeldt was robbed and beaten senseless. When Klaus died six months later, a case of assault and battery...

Joe Gunther puts a murder investigation on hold to help his girlfriend Lyn solve her father's mysterious death in Maine. Discovering that Lyn's father and brother weren't the good guys that Lyn always believed them to be and that they might have been involved with vicious smugglers who murdered them, Gunther sets out to protect Lyn from the same fate.

In Brattleboro, Vermont, Lieutenant Joe Gunther juggles several cases, all of which turn out to be connected. There is the murder of a girl runaway, the disappearance of a local activist, the death of a homeless man, and the strangling of a woman due to die anyway. By the author of The Dark Root.

"In Archer Mayor's intriguing new Vermont-based mystery, The Orphan's Guilt, a straightforward traffic stop snowballs into a homicide investigation after Joe Gunther and his fellow investigators peel back layer upon layer of history and personal heartbreak to learn a decades-old hidden truth. John Rust is arrested for drunk driving by a Vermont state trooper. Looking to find mitigating circumstances, John's lawyer hires private eye Sally Kravitz to...

A frozen body is found on top of Vermont's tallest mountain in middle of winter. Lost hiker or foul play? It's hard to say, until the marble-hard body is thawed out, revealing oddly old-fashioned clothes, an ice-pick wound to the heart, and a Canadian driver's license dating back 50 years. Identified as an old-time smuggler from Sherbrooke, Quebec, and the patriarch of a now powerful crime syndicate, the body reveals further clues--and points the...

Joe Gunther and the VBI team are investigating a murder and an arson case--both potentially related to an outbreak of ebola. When the body of a young woman is found near a trail at a popular ski mountain, the case falls to Joe Gunther and his team at the Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI). They quickly have a suspect, Mick Durocher, and a confession, but not everyone on the team is convinced. Despite Mick's ready admission, investigators quickly...