Archer Mayor's Blog, page 3
September 5, 2019
August 23, 2019
30th Joe Gunther Book
Bomber’s Moon, out September
24, marks New York Times Best
Selling Author Archer Mayor’s 30th novel in the highly acclaimed Vermont-based
Joe Gunther mystery series.
Detective Joe Gunther worked for the Brattleboro, Vermont police department and is now a Special Agent for the fictional Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI). Books about his case-solving prowess have appeared once a year since 1988 and been published in five languages. They routinely gather high praise from such sources as The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and The New Yorker, often appearing on annual ten best lists.
Described by the Chicago Tribune as “the best police procedurals being written in America,” Archer Mayor loosely bases his novels on his actual experience in the field. Over the past 30 years, he has served as a firefighter/EMT and a police officer, and continues to work as a death investigator for Vermont’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Mayor’s earlier employment in other fields also informs his books. A graduate of Yale, he has been a scholarly editor, historian, researcher, and photographer, as well as a political advance man and a medical illustrator.
According to American writer of
crime fiction Reed Farrel Coleman, “While thousands of other writers have been
touted as the next big thing, only to crash and burn, Archer Mayor has thrived.
He has produced consistently fine and enviable prose.”
Packed with human interest and local color typical of Mayor’s writing, his 30th novel, Bomber’s Moon, surpasses its predecessors with the author’s trademark twists and turns. The book features two strong young women, (one a hard-boiled introvert, the other a trusting extrovert) unlikely partners, who are both embroiled in the same crime from opposite angles.
Having reached this notable
benchmark in the Joe Gunther series and in his career as a writer, Mayor says,
“It’s felt like writing thirty chapters of a single biography of an intriguing,
fallible, dedicated team of people, against the backdrop of a state whose
picture-perfect image often runs very much at odds with its hardscrabble, often
darker realities. Just like Johnny Depp.”
Celebrations
To celebrate the launch of Bomber’s Moon, there will be a book party and signing on Wednesday, October 2 from 5-7 pm at The Mill in East Arlington, VT with Northshire Bookstore; and a Brattleboro celebration and signing, at the Brooks Memorial Library in Joe Gunther’s hometown of Brattleboro, VT on Saturday, October 19 from 6:30-8:30 pm with Everyone’s Books. Both are open to the public.
During October and November Archer Mayor will make several author appearances at bookstores and libraries throughout New England. See the list of events.
Bomber’s Moon can be pre-ordered
from online booksellers in advance of the September 24 release date.
August 14, 2019
June 22, 2019
Crosscut: a Joe Gunther Short Story
Crosscut is the very first short story from Archer Mayor’s much-loved Joe Gunther series.
To be released on July 23, 2019 this e-book can be pre-ordered now!
Order Crosscut
Going
into the previously unexplored history of VBI Detective Sammie Martens,
Archer Mayor reveals the story of how Sammie first met Joe Gunther and
Willie Kunkel.
Sammie Martens, raised by a single mother in a
chaotic household, returns home after leaving the Army only to have her
mother’s current boyfriend kick her out of the house. When her mother is
arrested the next day on a charge of armed robbery, Sammie is convinced
her mother’s boyfriend set it up and is now up to no good. Warned to
stay away by the seemingly uninterested police, Sammie does exactly the
opposite and starts her own investigation.
Includes 3 free chapters of Bomber’s Moon, the next book in the Joe Gunther series.
June 21, 2019
Trace Now Available in Paperback, Book #28
Released May 15, 2019.
The Vermont Bureau of
Investigation (VBI) has been pulled onto three cases at the same time;
meanwhile, VBI head Joe Gunther has to take time off to care for his
ailing mother.
Those cases are now in the hands of the individual
investigators. Sammie Martens is assigned a murder case. The victim is a
young woman, the roommate of the daughter of Medical Examiner Beverly
Hillstrom. A recent transplant from Albany, New York, Sammie must find
out what put a hit man on the trail of this seemingly innocent young
woman.
Lester Spinney takes over a famous cold case, a double
murder where a state trooper and a motorist were killed in an exchange
of gunfire. Or so it has seemed for years. When Lester is told that the
motorist’s fingerprints were planted on the gun he’s supposed to have
fired, it opens the question―who really killed the state trooper?
Willy
Kunkle’s case starts with a child’s discovery of three teeth on a
railroad track, leading eventually to a case of possible sabotage
against critical military equipment.
In cases that lead the team
all over Vermont and nearby, Archer Mayor once again shows why his
novels featuring Joe Gunther and the VBI team are among the finest crime
fiction today.
Trace Now Available in Paperback
Trace has been published in paperback.
June 20, 2019
Criminal Element Essay
I
am often asked if any of my old law enforcement and/or medical examiner
investigations have ever made it into my thirty Joe Gunther mysteries?
It’s a natural line of inquiry. I have been responding to emergency calls — at first as a firefighter/EMT — since before the series began in 1988.
The
raw materials of crisis, loss, and stress have commingled with repeated
exposure to happenstance, mean-spiritedness, and stupidity, and seeped into my
soul. The fact that I’ve done all this in rural Vermont has been an ironic
blessing: I am the first to acknowledge that, regardless of what I and my
colleagues have seen up here, it holds no comparison to the onslaught in
crowded urban environments.
Still,
I have been witness to my share of suffering and sorrow. It doesn’t take a
psychiatrist to suggest that such exposure to toxicity might take a toll.
In
simple terms: Where do you put those feelings?
In
my case, I don’t drink alcohol, or engage in extreme sports. My pets don’t
suffer from excessive outbursts of anger. I don’t overeat, or speed on my
motorcycle, or find solace in drug use, or even garden obsessively.
I write.
I have created a parallel universe that I visit almost every day. It is populated by confused, anxious, angry, and sometimes criminally-minded people — just like my real world — but it is also filled with Joe Gunther and his friends and colleagues. And these people — although sometimes conflicted and challenged (and fictitious) — remain predictably and reliably thoughtful, considerate, hard-working, and just.
In
their company, I replay some of the awful things I have visited in truth, place
them within fictional settings, and call upon Joe and the others to process
them according to their baseline standard of common decency.
I have worked side-by-side with firefighters, EMTs, police officers, ski patrollers, hospital staffers, social workers, judges, attorneys, and others of similar stripe, in all kinds of circumstances. I am hard put to think of a single one of these people — despite a vast and varied spectrum of personalities, beliefs, and experience — that didn’t share the fundamental integrity to be found in my fictional characters. Were some of these people I can barely stand? Of course. Were some of their politics at odds with mine? Yes. Did a few have a moral scale and ethical scale I found wanting? Occasionally.
But
they stood in the trench I was in at the time. We learned to do the job in
unison. We knew enough not to probe where it wasn’t necessary for the job. We cut
each other slack.
I have one character most of my readers love to hate, or hate to love. His name is Willy Kunkle, and he’s as grouchy, thin-skinned, and dismissive a man as you can imagine. He is also a tortured soul and a battered spirit who’s had the good sense to keep close the people who see beyond his ill manners. He’s also a warning for those who believe that one’s outer, social behavior is a clear lens into a person’s inner workings. I like Willy — I’ve even been accused of being Willy — precisely because of the mixed message he presents.
All of the above being said, however, I must address the opening question—has a case ever made it into a book? — by answering with a qualified “no.” Given the world I inhabit, of laws and procedures and protocols, it would be unethical — not to mention unseemly — for me to ever literally bring an actual investigation into one of my fictional plots.
But…
There was one, now quite a few years ago, where my co-investigator and I (I was there wearing my medical examiner’s hat; he was police) were stumped by the cause — and therefore the manner — of this person’s death. She was middle-aged, reasonably healthy, living alone, and — our research revealed — in mourning, unhappy, and broke. Based on our experience and findings, it presented as a suicide.
Except it wasn’t.
An
autopsy was conducted, to no avail; toxicology was run, with no telling
results; the investigation was broadened, with no joy in the end. My colleague
and I were officially stumped, and the case was finally listed, “Undetermined.”
That
was frustrating enough. The pathos of what we’d found, however, cut deeper.
Given that we’d found nothing probative, any remotely likely alternative theory
began to have merit.
For
the first time in my legal career, I entertained bringing this situation in for
a fictional treatment.
I changed the gender, the location, the circumstances, and almost everything else about what I’d seen, and then allowed my make-believe characters to apply their magical processes to the case’s resolution. The end result — in THE SECOND MOUSE — gave me a sense of resolution that I’ve enjoyed to the present day.
People
have told me that they read detective fiction to escape. I suppose, in that
light, that I write it in part to restore my inner balance.
August 9, 2018
Bury the Lead (2018), Book #29
The Plot
Joe Gunther and the VBI team are investigating a murder and an arson case―both potentially related to an outbreak of Ebola.
When the body of a young woman is found near a trail at a popular ski mountain, the case falls to Joe Gunther and his team at the Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI). They quickly have a suspect, Mick Durocher, and a confession, but not everyone on the team is convinced. Despite Mick’s ready admission, investigators quickly sense there might be more going on than is immediately apparent.
At the same time, a large local business is being targeted with escalating acts of vandalism―a warehouse fire, a vandalized truck, a massive cooling system destroyed―resulting in loss of life. And either by coincidence, or not, Mick Durocher, the self-confessed murderer, was once employed by this very company.
These two puzzling cases―now possibly connected―are further complicated by the sidelining of a key member of VBI, Willy Kunkle, who undergoes surgery at a hospital that appears to be having an unlikely―and suspiciously timed―outbreak of Ebola.
Joe and his team pursue these cases, uncovering motives that might link them, while proving that trust betrayed can be a toxic virus, turning love into murderous loathing. Indeed, behind the mayhem and murder, Joe must uncover a tragic history before another victim dies.
Bury the Lead (2018)
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The Plot
Joe Gunther and the VBI team are investigating a murder and an arson case―both potentially related to an outbreak of ebola.
When the body of a young woman is found near a trail at a popular ski mountain, the case falls to Joe Gunther and his team at the Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI). They quickly have a suspect, Mick Durocher, and a confession, but not everyone on the team is convinced. Despite Mick’s ready admission, investigators quickly sense there might be more going on than is immediately apparent.
At the same time, a large local business is being targeted with escalating acts of vandalism―a warehouse fire, a vandalized truck, a massive cooling system destroyed―resulting in loss of life. And either by coincidence, or not, Mick Durocher, the self-confessed murderer, was once employed by this very company.
These two puzzling cases―now possibly connected―are further complicated by the sidelining of a key member of VBI, Willy Kunkle, who undergoes surgery at a hospital that appears to be having an unlikely―and suspiciously timed―outbreak of Ebola.
Joe and his team pursue these cases, uncovering motives that might link them, while proving that trust betrayed can be a toxic virus, turning love into murderous loathing. Indeed, behind the mayhem and murder, Joe must uncover a tragic history before another victim dies.
July 30, 2018
BURY THE LEAD — coming in September!
Creeping closer to a milestone – book #30!
But this year brings book #29 . . .
A murderer’s confession is in doubt.
Grocery distribution is in jeopardy.
Family complexities abound.
Personal appearances start in September. Check out the Events page for Archer’s schedule.
