Archer Mayor and Joe Gunther: Books 9-11

First edition

Archer Mayor's reprint cover

THE DISPOSABLE MAN (1998) is one of the more complex of Archer Mayor's Joe Gunther series. It opens with a corpse that Joe identifies as a probably Mob hit, takes Joe through a frame-up, wrestles with the complex and fragile relationship that he and his lover Gail Zigman are rebuilding (she is recovering from being raped; Joe is often helpless in the river of grief and pain that engulfs the two of them), and tangles Joe and his team with both the CIA and the FBI. As I look back now, I'm stunned at the amount of research that must have gone into this one -- way beyond the author's usual police and emergency responder jobs in southeastern Vermont. I'm going to steal some time over the end-of-year holidays to re-read it from cover to cover.

First edition

Archer Mayor's reprint

The tenth Gunther investigation is OCCAM'S RAZOR (1999), and that's what I spent my last two evenings re-reading. I always felt the title spoke especially to me, since I knew what "Occam's Razor" represented in logic and philosophy (and science): that the simplest explanation is often the strongest, as long as it covers all the data. The death at the start of the book is a nasty one: a man placed on a railroad track at night, just before the train arrives -- taking off his head and hands as it chugs past. Mayor brings the plot back home in this one, as Lieutenant Joe Gunther and his three other detectives -- Ron, Sammie, and Willy -- work their way through the "bottom feeders" of Brattleboro, figuring out the connections among poker players, a journal-keeping prostitute, and illegal hauling of toxic waste. By the end of the well-written and intricately plotted book, two startling changes have arrived on the otherwise familiar home turf: Sammie has lost her heart and then started over, and Joe has applied to the state's new (and totally imaginary) police team, the Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI). Those set the stage for the next ten books ahead.

First edition

Archer Mayor's reprint

In THE MARBLE MASK, Joe tackles his first assignment as head of the new and mostly unwelcome VBI. And it's a head-spinner that begins with a frozen body at a ski slope -- a body that's been frozen since the end of the Second World War. Mayor was a town constable in a Vermont village while writing this one, but in his hands, Gunther's investigation extended not just 50 years back in time, but across an international border, into Quebec. With Joe's most difficult fellow investigator, Willy Kunkle, caught up in the VBI work, problems multiply. Joe's own take on Willy is: "A complicated, difficult man, fighting more internal battles than any of us could know." Is there even a chance that the VBI will make room for Willy over the long haul?

Hold that thought, because it has a lot to do with the next three books. By the way, art for the original covers of these three books is by Mark Elliott.

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Planning to come to Archer Mayor's Oct. 15 visit at Kingdom Books? He'll be here at 2 p.m. to introduce TAG MAN. Please do reserve your book in advance if you can -- we've got a nice stack but it won't last. Catch Dave at 802-751-8374 or KingdomBks@gmail.com; yes, we ship.