About this item
Joe Gunther and the VBI team are investigating a murder and an arson case -- both potentially related to an outbreak of ebola.When the dead body of a young woman is found near a trail at one of Vermont's popular ski mountains, the case falls to Joe Gunther and his team at the Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI) . They quickly have a suspect, who confesses, but the whole squad isn't convinced -- the evidence is thin at best. At the same time, a local firm is being targeted with acts of sabotage -- a warehouse fire, a vandalized truck, a massive cooling system destroyed -- resulting in loss of life. Mick Durocher, the same man who confessed to the murder of the young woman, was briefly an employee at the company being targeted.These two puzzling cases -- possibly connected -- are complicated by the sidelining of one of the key members of VBI, Willy Kunkle, who undergoes surgery at a hospital which appears to be having an outbreak of Ebola.Joe and his team investigate the various cases, pursuing motives that might tie them together, proving that the opposite of trust can be betrayal and that thwarted devotion can lead to murderous loathing. And behind the mayhem, and murder, lies a tragic history that must be uncovered and resolved before yet another person dies -- in Archer Mayor's latest novel featuring Joe Gunther.
About the Author
Archer Mayor is the author of the highly acclaimed Vermont-based series featuring detective Joe Gunther, which the Chicago Tribune describes as "the best police procedurals being written in America." His 28th book, TRACE, is now in stores (Sept. 2017 - Minotaur/St. Martin's Press) . He is a past winner of the New England Independent Booksellers Association Award for Best Fiction - the first time a writer of crime literature has been so honored. In 2011, Mayor's 22nd Joe Gunther novel, TAG MAN, earned a place on The New York Times bestseller list for hardback fiction.Before turning his hand to fiction, Mayor wrote history books, the most notable of which, Southern Timberman: The Legacy of William Buchanan, concerned the lumber and oil business in Louisiana from the 1870s to the 1970s. This book was published in 1988 and very well received; it was republished as a trade paperback in 2009.Archer Mayor is currently a death investigator for Vermont's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Over the past thirty years, he has also been a detective for the Windham County Sheriff's Office, a volunteer firefighter/EMT, the publisher of his own backlist, and a frequent contributor to magazines and newspapers.Mayor was brought up in the US, Canada and France and had been employed as a scholarly editor, a researcher for TIME-LIFE Books, a political advance-man, a theater photographer, a newspaper writer/editor, a lab technician for Paris-Match Magazine in Paris, France, and a medical illustrator. In addition to writing novels and occasional articles, Mayor gives talks all around the country, and has been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Young Writers conference in Middlebury, Vermont, and the Colby College seminar on forensic sciences in Waterville, Maine.Mayor's critically-acclaimed series of police novels feature Lt. Joe Gunther of the Brattleboro, Vermont, police department. The books, which have been appearing about once a year since 1988, have been published in five languages (if you count British) , and routinely gather high praise from such sources as The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New Yorker, and others, often appearing on their "ten best" yearly lists.Whereas many writers base their books only on interviews and scholarly research, Mayor's novels are based on actual experience in the field. The result adds a depth, detail and veracity to his characters and their tribulations that has led The New York Times to call him "the boss man on procedures".
