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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Oct 2005, 304 pages
Paperback:
Oct 2006, 352 pages
In his 15th case, Joe Gunter will meet one of his deadliest opponents to date, and he will need far more than his skills as a policeman to protect the people closest to his heart.
Archer Mayor's talents for combining compelling characters, intriguing
settings, and gripping plots have earned him great critical acclaim. His
previous novel, The Surrogate Thief, won the 2004 New England Book Award for
Fiction, the first time this prize has ever been given to a mystery writer. Now
in a sizzling new novel, Mayor's hero Joe Gunther returns to solve the mystery
of the deadly...
ST. ALBANS FIRE
Winter is on the wane in northwestern Vermont. The moon hangs bright and cold
in the silvery night sky over hundreds of square miles of a peaceful, dormant
landscape of dairy farms. Young Bobby Cutts enters the family barn to tend to
the beasts within…and encounters a nightmare. Suddenly surrounded by bolts of
fire, Bobby and the entire herd perish in a stampeding, hellish circle of
flames.
Called to the scene to investigate, Joe Gunther instantly recognizes arson.
But by whom? And for what possible reason? There is little insurance, the family
is loving and tightly knit, and there are few neighborhood animosities.
Yet murder this is, and Gunther quickly discovers that someone is wreaking
havoc across the bucolic farmlands surrounding the town of St. Albans. Somewhere
in the dense social fabric of the community, in the hearts and souls of Bobby's
family, and in the cutthroat farming business underneath the region's placid
exterior are the truths Joe Gunther and his team must ferret out. But what
looked like a local case is about to take them from the barns of Vermont to the
gritty streets of Newark, New Jersey.
Before all is said and done, Joe Gunther will meet one of his deadliest
opponents to date…and he will need far more than his skills as a policeman to
protect the people closest to his heart.
Chapter 1
Bobby Cutts lay on his bed, watching the bedroom ceiling, its shadowy surface
painted by the downstairs porch light in a pattern he'd known forever. This
room and the barn across the road had always been his sanctuaries—places of
private celebration during high times, as when Beverly Cable allowed him a kiss
in the eighth grade—and harbors to which he retired in pain, as now, when
Marianne had once again suggested that they should try seeing other people.
He hated that euphemism, knowing too well what it meant. Marianne and he had
been dating for a year, and it had happened twice already, counting this one. In
fact, he'd been the one being "seen" when they first met, as she was
dumping Barry Newhouse. He remembered the groping at the drive-in, the more
serious stuff on her uncle's office couch one afternoon, and finally those
hours in complete silence in her bedroom as her parents slept down the hall.
Recalling that night—the smells of ...
When asked
why he writes what he writes,
Mayor says he's boiled down his
answer to, 'ignorance and
curiosity - I am driven to find
out more about the world I
inhabit, but about which I will
always know too little.'
In
addition to writing a novel each
year, Mayor also finds time to
be a town constable, an interior
attack fire fighter, moderator
at the annual town meeting, on
the board of trustees of a
nearby hospital, captain the
local Rescue Squad, and has
applied to join ...
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