Archer Mayor

Across Brattleboro, Vermont, rich people (some with dark secrets) are waking up in their high security, alarm-equipped homes to find a Post-it note stuck to their bedside tables reading, “You’re it.” There is little sign of disturbance anywhere, nothing stolen (that anyone admits) and only...

In Archer Mayor’s Fall Guy, a body found in the trunk of a stolen car leads Joe Gunther and his team to crucial evidence in an infamous unsolved case from years past. A high-end stolen car is discovered in Vermont. A car filled with stolen items from a far-flung two stage burglary spree. But...

The murder of a small-time drug dealer snowballs into the most complex case ever faced by Joe Gunther and his VBI team. It is said a bright and clear bomber’s moon is the best asset to finding one’s target. But beware what you wish for: what you can see at night can also see you, often with...

News travels fast in the small state of Vermont. In this tight-knit society, police officers and investigators proudly maintain a kinship that transcends the boundaries of their jurisdictions. When an unidentified body is found in the peaceful town of Brattleboro, local police and the Vermont...

A legend among Vermont cops, Joe Gunther has solved more local whodunits than a whole squad of detectives. But his latest case takes him and his team off their Brattleboro home turf, 42 miles west, to chip-on-its-shoulder, blue-collar Bennington. On the edge of town, Gunther encounters the...

With Joe Gunther and his Vermont Bureau of Investigation team spread thin on assignment everywhere, from the remote dairy country of Northwest Vermont to the slums of Newark, New Jersey, they're pushed to their absolute limit when a string of serial arsons across the Green Mountain State evolves...

A 40-year-old skeleton is found encased in a concrete slab at a recently decommissioned nuclear energy site. It becomes a case for the Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI) and its leader, Joe Gunther, since they have the resources and the ability to investigate an old, very cold, missing...

The harrowing call comes from the NYPD: Willy's ex-wife Mary has been found dead in her Lower East Side apartment, and Willy is asked to identify the body. Torn from his beloved Vermont, Willy returns to the city of his hard-drinking youth with misgivings that deepen when he sees Mary's sad...

A small girl brings Joe Gunther a bird's nest - made partially of human hair. In the search to match a body - and an identity - to the hair's owner, Joe comes across an unexplained death, a grisly murder, and a sudden disappearance. All seem to be entangled in a puzzling web of municipal...

A brutal home invasion shocks Brattleboro's small Asian community, but no one is talking. Undeterred, Joe Gunther digs deeper and discovers a cross-border smuggling route carrying drugs, contraband, and illegal aliens into and out of Canada. Operating below the radar for years, competition...

When Gail Zigman, town selectwoman and Joe Gunther's companion of many years, is raped, Gunther finds himself caught between the media, local politicians, and a network of well-meaning victims' rights advocates as he tries to put his own feelings aside and follow a trail of evidence. Every lead...

An overworked sheriff and a string of condo burglaries at a luxurious ski resort have Lieutenant Joe Gunther and the newly minted Vermont Bureau of Investigation digging deep for clues. But it doesn't take long for Joe to find the most likely thief missing and his girlfriend dead. As the...

When a reclusive market gardener's death proves to stem from a 20-year-old bullet wound, Lieutenant Joe Gunther is presented with a very cold homicide to solve. But who was the victim exactly? A deeply private man eking out an ascetic existence from a hardscrabble mountain field, Abraham Fuller...

Joe Gunther is sent to the neighboring town of Bellows Falls to investigate harassment allegations against a fellow officer. But as Gunther doggedly pursues the truth, what begins as a seemingly open-and-shut case starts to look more and more like a frame job, and he soon finds himself feeling...

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...

When a local quarry yields a garroted body with bad dental work and toes tattooed in Cyrillic, Joe Gunther figures it's a Russian Mafia killing, rare as that might be in Vermont. But it's so very...tidy. So very...professional. Then the CIA calls, inviting Gunther down to Washington for some...

Lt. Joe Gunther of the Brattleboro, Vermont, police force has a serious problem: in a community where a decade could pass without a single murder, the body count is suddenly mounting. Innocent citizens are being killed - and others set up - seemingly orchestrated by a mysterious ski-masked man...

The body was positioned so that the train would neatly obliterate its head and hands. Dressed in a homeless man's clothes with empty pockets, it might easily be passed off as an unfortunate John Doe. But Joe Gunther has a knack for knowing when things don't quite add up, and the math in this...

The death of a local millionaire becomes suspicious when Joe Gunther learns that he was not who he claimed. A year ago, local philanthropist and millionaire Nathan Lyon died a natural death in his sprawling mansion, a 150,000-square-foot converted mill, surrounded by his loving, attentive family...

In Archer Mayor’s intriguing new Vermont-based mystery, The Orphan’s Guilt, a straightforward traffic stop snowballs into a homicide investigation after Joe Gunther and his fellow investigators peel back layer upon layer of history and personal heartbreak to learn a decades-old hidden truth...