Archer Mayor

After The Rift

The Echo of Broken Dreams

In Archer Mayor's Marked Man, the death of a local millionaire becomes suspicious when Joe Gunther learns that he was not who he claimed. A year ago, local philanthropist and millionaire Nathan Lyon died a natural death in his sprawling mansion, a 150,000 square foot converted mill, surrounded by his loving, attentive family. Or so it seemed at the time. Now Joe Gunther and his Vermont Bureau of Investigation team has discovered that almost nothing about that story was true. Nathan Lyon was actually Nick Bianchi from Providence, Rhode Island. His money came from Mafia-tainted sources. And his family now seems to be dying themselves and their deaths are now revealed to be murders. As Gunther’s team desperately works to uncover what is going on at The Mill, who is responsible and what they are trying to accomplish, Joe himself travels to Rhode Island to look into the original source of the money. While the police are doing their jobs, private investigator Sally Kravitz teams up with reporter Rachel Reiling to expose the truth behind this tangled and expanding web of duplicity, greed, and obsession. Having betrayed many, it’s no surprise that Nathan Lyon was a marked man. But now Gunther has to figure out who, among the many, killed him, and stop them before their killing spree claims another.

A Joe Gunther Novel

Marked Man

After The Rift, Book 4

The Temple of Forgotten Secrets

A frightened old woman kills a man at her door in the middle of the night and Detective Joe Gunther discovers they were co-jurors on a sensational murder trial three years earlier. Several more vicious assaults make Joe suspect that all of the jurors from that trial are now in danger.

Open Season

A Ministry of Curiosities Novella

Ashes to Ashes

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 look into the recent death of John’s younger brother, purportedly from a childhood brain injury years earlier. But what was the nature of that injury, and might its mechanism point more to murder than to natural causes? That debate brings in Joe Gunther and his team. Gunther’s efforts quickly uncover an ancient tale of avarice, betrayal, and vengeance that swirled around the Rust boys growing up. Their parents and the people they consorted with—forgotten, relentless, but now jolted to action by this simple set of circumstances—emerge with a destructive passion. All while the presumably innocent John Rust mysteriously vanishes with no explanation.

The Orphan's Guilt

The murder of a small-time drug dealer snowballs into the most complex case ever faced by Joe Gunther and his VBI team. It is said a bright and clear bomber’s moon is the best asset to finding one’s target. But beware what you wish for: What you can see at night can also see you. Often with dire consequences. Bomber's Moon is Archer Mayor’s latest entry in the Joe Gunther series and it may just be his best yet. Two young women form the heart of this tale. One, an investigative reporter, the other a private investigator. Uneasy allies from completely different walks of life, they work together—around and sometimes against Joe Gunther and his VBI cops—in an attempt to connect the murders of a small town drug dealer, a smart, engaging, fatally flawed thief, and the tangled, political, increasingly dark goings on at a prestigious prep school. While Gunther and the VBI set about solving the two murders, Sally Kravitz and Rachel Reiling combine their talents and resources to go where the police cannot, from working undercover at Thorndike Academy, to having clandestine meetings with criminals for their insider’s knowledge of Vermont’s unexpectedly illicit underbelly. But there is a third element at work. A malevolent force, the common link in all this death and chaos, is hard at work sowing mayhem to protect its ancient, vicious, very dark roots.

Bomber's Moon

When an old gravesite exposes a coffin filled with rocks instead of the expected remains, and a retired state politician turns up dead, Joe Gunther and his team follow the evidence to an escaped mental patient who holds the key to solving both cases.

Three Can Keep a Secret

A Joe Gunther Mystery

Fruits of the Poisonous Tree

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. Yet Willy has doubts. Driven by loss and guilt, he searches deeper and deeper into his past, to a long-ago Vietnam where he was a merciless loner known as the Sniper. Soon Willy will answer for his old sins...and live up to his chilling nickname.

The Sniper's Wife

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.

Bellows Falls

Fall Guy

In the latest gripping police procedural from award-winning author Archer Mayor, Joe Gunther and his team investigate a disturbing case of homicide and Internet child predators.

Chat

Glass and Steele, Book 8

The Prisoner's Key

Joe Gunther and the VBI team are investigating a murder and an arson case-both potentially related to a small but lethal outbreak of Ebola at a local hospital. 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 of Mick's truthfulness. Despite his ready admission, investigators quickly sense there might be more going on than is immediately apparent. At the same time, a large local business is being targeted with escalating acts of violence-a warehouse fire, a booby rigged truck, an industrial gas leak murderously unleashed. The odd and common denominator? Mick Durocher, the self-confessed murderer, was once employed by the same company. These two puzzling cases-only tenuously connected-are further complicated by the sidelining of a key member of VBI. Willy Kunkle is undergoing surgery at the same hospital saddled with the unlikely- and suspiciously timed-outbreak of Ebola. Joe and his team pursue these cases, uncovering motives that might link them, while proving that trust betrayed can be a toxic virus, transforming love into savage loathing. Indeed, behind the mayhem and murder, Joe must uncover a tragic family history before another victim dies.

Bury the Lead

The only identifying marks on a body left in a backwoods quarry are dental work and faded tattoos. Investigating police detective Joe Gunther enters the paranoid world of the CIA and Russian mafia, which will do anything to settle an old Cold War dispute--including getting rid of Joe by framing him for a crime he didn't commit.

The Disposable Man

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.

Gatekeeper

Crosscut is the very first short story from Archer Mayor's much-loved Joe Gunther series. Going into the previously unexplored history of VBI Detective Sammie Martens, Archer Mayor reveals the story of how Sammie first met Joe Gunther and Willie Kunkel. Sammie Martens, raised by a single mother in a chaotic household, returns home after leaving the Army only to have her mother's current boyfriend kick her out of the house. When her mother is arrested the next day on a charge of armed robbery, Sammie is convinced her mother's boyfriend set it up and is now up to no good. Warned to stay away by the seemingly uninterested police, Sammie does exactly the opposite and starts her own investigation. Includes 3 free chapters of Bomber's Moon, the next book in the Joe Gunther series.

A Joe Gunther Short Story

Crosscut

The Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI) has been pulled onto three cases at the same time; meanwhile, VBI head Joe Gunther has to take time off to care for his ailing mother. Those cases are now in the hands of the individual investigators. Sammie Martens is assigned a murder case. The victim is a young woman, the roommate of the daughter of Medical Examiner Beverly Hillstrom, and a recent transplant from Albany, New York. Sammie must find out what put a hit man on the trail of this seemingly innocent young woman. Lester Spinney takes over a famous cold case, a double murder where a state trooper and a motorist were killed in an exchange of gunfire. Or so it has seemed for years. When Lester is told that the motorist's fingerprints were planted on the gun he's supposed to have fired, it opens the question--who really killed the state trooper? Willy Kunkle's case starts with a child's discovery of three teeth on a railroad track, leading eventually to a case of possible sabotage against critical military equipment. In cases that lead the team all over Vermont and nearby, Archer Mayor once again shows why his novels featuring Joe Gunther and the VBI team are among the finest crime fiction today.

Trace

During the height of a harsh Vermont winter, the body of a woman is found hanging from the steel-mesh retaining net lining the cliffs along the interstate. She was brutally murdered, with the word "dyke" carved into her chest. She was also a state senator and best friend and ally of the current governor, Gail Zigman. At Zigman's personal request, Joe Gunther and his Vermont Bureau of Investigation team agree to help the Vermont State Police in their investigation before the victim's high profile and powerful friends create the inevitable publicity maelstrom. Raffner was indeed a lesbian, and the word carved into her chest might be evidence of a hate crime, or it might be a feint designed to confuse and mislead investigators. But the question remains-what was she involved with, who wanted her dead, and what company was she keeping? What Gunther and his team discover during their initial investigation isn't the stuff of a simple murder. Someone killed a prominent figure and fabricated an elaborate scene for a purpose. And this might only be the beginning...in Archer Mayor's The Company She Kept.

Archer Mayor

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