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Entra en un mundo infinito de historias

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Archer Mayor

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.

Signs suggest that a three-year-old murder trial might lie at the heart of things, but it’s a case that many in the department would prefer remained closed. A man of quiet integrity, Lt. Gunther knows that he must pursue the case to its conclusion, wherever it leads.

Tom Taylorson

Blackstone Publishing

Joe Gunther Mysteries

Open Season

Lieutenant Joe Gunther is in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom investigating a minor embezzling case. It’s a pleasant distraction and a chance to reconnect with old friends, but when a house fire reveals itself to be arson, compounded by murder, Gunther can’t help but investigate. He quickly finds himself enmeshed in a web of animosity between put-upon townspeople, the state police, angry parents, and members of a reclusive sect.

Murder follows murder, yet no one seems to be telling Gunther the whole truth—not even his childhood friends. And truth is what he desperately needs if he’s to stop the killings.

Borderlines

When the body of a fast-living young stockbroker is found in a shallow grave, suspicion first falls on a cuckolded policeman. Lieutenant Joe Gunther investigates the increasingly bizarre details of the crime, but he’s too far behind events to prevent a second murder. Indeed, whoever is responsible always seems to be a few steps ahead, as if there’s a leak in the police force. Sweltering August heat does nothing to calm the increasingly agitated town selectmen, who demand results.

Scent of Evil

When a reclusive market gardener’s death proves to stem from a twenty-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 was virtually unknown to his neighbors, in the manner of someone pursuing more than mere solitude. The discovery of a bag full of unmarked bills and a body buried in the garden patch suggests that Fuller had motives beyond misanthropy. With someone willing to kill to ensure that old secrets remain buried, the case may not be so cold after all.

The Skeleton’s Knee

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 points to a single, obvious suspect, but is the evidence too perfect?

Risking his friendship with Gail, the respect of his peers, and his own life, Lieutenant Gunther keeps digging, hoping to find out if the man they have in jail is rightly there, or if the evidence against him is tainted—what police call “fruits of the poisonous tree.”

Fruits of the Poisonous Tree

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 between underworld rivals is bringing it into the light with deadly consequences.

International jurisdiction is a complicated matter, and in the pursuit of justice, Gunther will have to collaborate with the FBI, the Border Patrol, and the Mounties.

The Dark Root

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 corruption, blackmail, and industrial espionage. A shell-shocked World War II veteran nicknamed the Ragman may hold the key to it all—but only if Joe can get him to talk before the murderer strikes again.

The Ragman’s Memory

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 around the edges of a statewide drug distribution network.

As always, Vermont itself is a major character in Mayor’s writing, with Bellows Falls standing in for any number of slowly decaying, once-proud mill towns.

Bellows Falls

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 friendly “assistance” with his case. Suddenly he’s caught up in a shadowy game of cross and double-cross—manipulated by cynical, cold warriors who don’t seem to have gotten the memo—and Gunther soon realizes that he’s a pawn both sides are willing to sacrifice.

The Disposable 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 case is all kinds of wrong. A toxic waste dumping scheme, a stabbing, and a whole lot of state politics quickly complicate matters further. If Occam’s razor were applied to Gunther’s caseload, how many incisions would it make?

Occam’s Razor

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 fifty-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 have been a 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’ 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 half-century-old crime forms an interesting puzzle that’s not fully revealed until the very end.

The Marble Mask

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 complications mount, from drug dealing to environmental terrorism to attempted murder, Joe and his team go undercover to infiltrate the closed society of a one-company town, populated by bored millionaires and supported by a small legion of resort employees, not all of whom are what they seem.

Tucker Peak

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 corpse on a gurney. Because of a fresh puncture mark in her arm, the police think she overdosed. But Willy has doubts.

Driven by loss and guilt, Willy searches deeper and deeper into his past, to a long-ago Vietnam where he was a merciless loner known as the Sniper. Soon he will answer for his old sins … and live up to his chilling nickname.

The Sniper’s Wife

When, in the course of a week, a young heroin addict is gunned down while trying to rob a convenience store, a narcotics dealer is found hanging from a bridge, and the granddaughter of a political bigwig dies of an overdose, Vermont detective Joe Gunther vows to stop the flow of drugs into his beloved state.

Gatekeeper

Over the years investigator Joe Gunther has battled drug pushers and corporate swindlers, grappled with environmental conspirators, and foiled gangs and home invaders. But while usually successful in his fight for the future of the small town of Brattleboro, Vermont, Gunther hasn’t always come out on top.

Thirty years earlier store owner Klaus Oberfeldt was robbed and beaten senseless. When Klaus died six months later, a case of assault and battery became first-degree murder. The guilty man eventually appeared to be a well-known, small-time crook, but enough time had elapsed for him to vanish. Gunther, distracted by his wife’s losing struggle with cancer in the same hospital where Klaus was slipping from life, did something that would plague him for the rest of his career: he let the case go cold, burying it in the past along with his private sorrows.

Now serendipitously reopened, the Oberfeldt investigation forces Gunther to revisit ancient history and open old wounds. Torn between righting the past and confronting his demons, the veteran cop faces the most personal and dangerous case of his career. For somewhere on the idyllic Brattleboro streets stalks a long-lost murderer who never quite disappeared—and with Joe’s renewed interest, now has good reason to kill again.

The Surrogate Thief

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 into the most shocking series of murders the bucolic region has ever known.

St. Albans Fire

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, forty-two miles west, to chip-on-its-shoulder, blue-collar Bennington.

On the edge of town, Gunther encounters the lifeless body of Michelle Fisher. Her corpse, pale and seemingly at peace, offers him no clues about who she was or how she died. There are no signs of violence, no disorder. Snapshots and postcards show a woman who laughed hard and lived harder. Yet diaries reveal a rootless life marred by depression and drink. Suicide seems a reasonable conclusion, but Gunther suspects foul play. The house is for sale, after all, and Michelle was its only tenant—one who resisted all efforts to have her evicted. The unsavory landlord is a prime suspect but is safely equipped with an impressively air-tight alibi.

To uncover the truth about the fate of this discarded, all-but-forgotten woman, Gunther must follow a confusing trail of half leads and mounting crimes. He draws near to a violent and careless trio of criminals whose leader is hellbent on making the career move of a lifetime—and willing to step on anyone who might get in his way.

The Second Mouse

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 Bureau of Investigation both appear at the scene.

But before investigator Joe Gunther can begin to gather evidence of murder, a family emergency sends him to his hometown, where the lives of his mother and brother have suddenly been threatened. Gunther reaches out to a network of police officers who know him only by name and reputation as he attempts to discover the source of this imminent danger.

Meanwhile, his investigative team chases an elusive murderer who has no apparent ties to the victim. In a state that is more like a neighborhood community, secrets are difficult to keep, and it’s sometimes impossible to know who can be trusted. To save those he holds closest to his heart, Gunther soon finds himself opposing criminals more menacing than any he has ever encountered.

Chat

During the height of a particularly brutal Vermont winter, a woman’s body is found one morning hanging high above the interstate. The woman, found with the word “dyke” carved on her chest, is quickly determined to be the victim of a brutal murder. That alone is enough to bring in Joe Gunther and his Vermont Bureau of Investigation team. But when the victim is identified not only as a state senator but as an intimate friend of the governor’s, it unleashes a publicity maelstrom that makes a difficult investigation even more challenging. While the anti-lesbian message is an obvious feint meant to mislead investigators, it does reveal that the governor is gay, and forces her to publicly acknowledge that fact.

In the meantime, while the publicity rages on to even greater heights, the police begin to focus intensely on the dead senator’s life. One thing they uncover is that she had a fondness for recreational marijuana. In Vermont, however, neither lesbianism nor marijuana use justify murder. It’s up to Gunther and his team to find out not just who, but why?

The Company She Kept: A Joe Gunther Novel

A forty-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 persons case that has now been reclassified as murder. The victim was Hank Mitchell, and Gunther must chase down old rumors and speculations: Who benefited from his death and the disappearance of his body? And was his death somehow tied to New York City mafia money being laundered through the construction project?

But what seems the coldest of cold cases roars back to life when one of the central figures in this mystery is shot to death, right after speaking with Gunther. And when a young police officer―the son of VBI investigator Lester Spinney―is kidnapped, is it meant to be a warning to the VBI team to drop the case?

After all these many years, the truth behind the murder still has to the power to kill, and it’s up to Gunther and his team to capture the living and finally put the dead to rest.

Joe Gunther Mysteries - La serie de libros

Joe Gunther Mysteries - La serie de libros

Joe Gunther Mysteries libros en orden

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