The Marble Mask: A Joe Gunther Novel

When a body is found on Vermont's Mt. Mansfield, most assume it is a hiker who lost his way. But the body is identified as an old-time smuggler from Quebec who has been dead and frozen for more than 50 years--and foul play is likely.

Lt. Joe Gunther sets out to solve the murder, landing him in a viper's nest of buried secrets, bloody gang wars, and a ruthless family with a taste for murder. 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 S ret , 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.