Brattleboro is the epitome of scenic Vermont. Quaint in its architecture and plainspoken in its politics, it dominates the state's southeast corner as both an employment hub and an election year powerhouse-all while looking like a genteel, postindustrial New England mill town. And yet there is darkness here, too, and nobody knows it better than Joe Gunther. Over the years he has battled drug pushers and corporate swindlers, grappled with environmental...

On the edge of town Joe Gunther encounters the lifeless body of Michelle Fisher. Her corpse offers him no clues about who she was or how she died. Snapshots and postcards show a woman who laughed hard and lived harder, while diaries reveal a rootless life marred by depression and drink. Suicide seems a reasonable conclusion, but Gunther suspects foul play.

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

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A small town near the Canadian border becomes a battleground for Asian gangs competing for the immigrant trade. Lieutenant Joe Gunther of the Brattleboro, Vermont, police department coordinates several agencies, including the FBI and the Mounties, in an operation to apprehend them. By the author of Fruits of the Poisonous Tree.

In Brattleboro, Vermont, Lieutenant Joe Gunther juggles several cases, all of which turn out to be connected. There is the murder of a girl runaway, the disappearance of a local activist, the death of a homeless man, and the strangling of a woman due to die anyway. By the author of The Dark Root.

Joe Gunther and his team at the Vermont Bureau of Investigation are alerted to a string of unrelated burglaries across the state. In addition to the usual items targeted in such crimes -- flat screens, computers, and stereos -- someone has also been stealing unique and hard-to-fence objects such as antiques and jewelry. Meanwhile, in Boston, an elderly woman is viciously murdered in her Beacon Hill home during a burglary. The Boston police find that...

"The man lies facedown in a deserted soapstone quarry, strangled to death by a piano wire. His face, frozen and purple, is still recognizably Slavic, and all the labels have been cut from his clothing."--BOOK JACKET. "Gunther smells a mob hit, but he's up against a wall. He's got an abandoned rental car with a bloodstained carpet. He's got a dead man someone's tossed in a pond with no identifiers except foreign dental work and faded, cryptic tattoos....