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.  

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. 

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? 

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." 

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.