Smuggler's Notch

by Joseph Koenig

This thriller centering around a brutal murder in snowbound Vermont "is his best yet. A gripping story, told with skill and style" (Tony Hillerman).Becky should know better than to hitchhike, but there's no other way to get home. She's waiting by the highway when a skinny Vermont hick named Paul Conklin offers her a ride. He's absent-minded and a little bit awkward, but comes off as harmless--until it's too late. They're deep in the woods when he rapes her, too far from town for anyone to hear her scream as he wraps his belt around her throat and slowly snuffs out her life. But he has made a mistake. Becky's father is friends with the attorney general, and the law will come down hard on Paul Conklin. In rural Vermont, law takes the form of men like Lawrence St. Germain, a hulking man accustomed to rough winters and grisly crime. He will sacrifice everything to avenge Becky's death, battling not just her killer, but the justice system itself.

Genres: Fiction, Crime

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 31, 1989

About the author

Joseph Koenig is an author of hard-boiled fiction. A former crime reporter, he won critical acclaim and an Edgar nomination for his first novel, Floater (1986), a grimly violent story of con men, cops, and killers in the Florida Everglades. His next two novels were Little Odessa (1988), a darkly comic tale of life in New York’s Ukrainian underworld, and Smugglers Notch (1989), a story of brutal murder in snowbound Vermont. Koenig’s fourth novel, the groundbreaking Brides of Blood (1993), won strong reviews for its elegant treatment of police procedure in Islamic Iran.

For nearly two decades after Brides of Blood, Koenig did not publish. But in 2012 the pulp-style publishing house Hard Case Crime released his newest novel, False Negative, a rollicking mystery about a journalist who, like Koenig once did, writes for true-crime magazines.

Reviews

[Erth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a bad read. Started off slow but gradually picked up. Good story. The ending was abrupt.

[Marlene · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the book, but knowing Vermont as well as I do having lived there all my life, I had a hard time with the use of real places versus fictional places. I wish the author had not used real locations because some of the distances between them just did not make sense. And what self-respecting person living in northwest Vermont has never heard of Mallets Bay? Oh, and Larry was definitely a jerk.

[Karen Cadorette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Smugglers notch

I really liked this book.at first I thought Larry was a jerk,but by the end I thought he finally fought back

[Randal · Rating 1 out of 5]

Woodchuck noir?

A nastily violent little crime novel set in Vermont. It's the story of Larry St. Germain, a big, ignorant sheriff's deputy, his enablers (everybody in the novel except the bad guy), and the psychopath who he runs up against.

Larry is generally known to the entire department to be a headline-chasing, rule-shirking, macho moron. He's also the only fleshed-out character in the book.

The story starts with a particularly violent rape and murder, which Larry winds up investigating. None of the investigation rings true, not how it happens, who's involved, the unbelievably good eyewitness, none of it. The geography is all wrong, the people. Nothing feels right.

So when the investigation crosses county lines, Larry's boss has to know that he'll never, ever bother to make one phone call to coordinate with the Chittenden County sheriff, because he's Larry. But the sheriff tells him to and expects it to happen. But Larry is Larry so he is never going to make the phone call. Bad things happen, and Larry's boss makes the shocked Pikachu face. Oh no? Who could have foreseen this? Besides everybody! It's like leaving a dog and a treat alone in a house for the day and being surprised to coming home with only a dog and no treat. And it's a key plot point, so kind of hard to ignore.

Then Larry has a crisis of confidence, more highly unlikely plotting, and finally an unsurprising shootout in -- hey, it's the title! -- Smugglers Notch.

Two stars minus one for the pornographic details of the rape scene at the start.