The Marble Mask
by Mayor, Archer
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 Sûreté,
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.
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 Sûreté,
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.