The Dark Root (49 page)

A brutal home invasion shocks Brattleboro’s small Asian community, but no one’s 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 thing, and Gunther will have to collaborate with the FBI, the Border Patrol and the Mounties in the pursuit of justice.

A small girl brings Joe Gunther a bird’s nest—made partially of human hair. In the search to put a body, and an identity, to the hair’s owner, Joe comes upon 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 vet nicknamed “The Ragman” may hold the key to it all, if Joe can get him to talk before the murderer strikes again.

Joe Gunther is seconded to the neighboring town of Bellows Falls to investigate harassment allegations against a fellow officer. What begins as a seemingly open-and-shut case comes to look more and more like a frame job as Gunther doggedly pursues the truth, and soon he 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.

When a local quarry yields up a garroted body with bad dental work and toes tattooed in Cyrillic, Joe Gunther figures it for 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 a shadowy game of cross and double-cross—manipulated by cynical cold warriors who seem not to have gotten the memo—and Gunther soon realizes that he’s a pawn that both sides are willing to sacrifice.

The body was positioned so that the train neatly obliterated 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. And yet… 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. Add a toxic waste dumping scheme, a stabbing, and a whole lot of state politics… if Occam’s razor were applied to Gunther’s caseload, how many incisions would it make?

There are old cases and there are cold cases, and then there are old, cold cases… Special Agent Joe Gunther, of the newly-formed Vermont Bureau of Investigation, didn’t expect the VBI’s first case to be a fifty year-old murder. Then again, the victim probably didn’t expect to get an icepick in the heart, spend half a century in a chest freezer, and be unceremoniously dumped on the slopes of a ski resort with his feet sawed-off. He was, after all, a man who commanded some respect.

Stirring up the past can be a dangerous business, and Gunther soon finds himself in a cross-border partnership with the Sûreté du Québec, investigating a Canadian mob family whose crimes date back to World War II, but who remain just as deadly as ever.

The tony ski town of Tucker Peak, Vermont is experiencing a rash of condo burglaries. Normally this wouldn’t be a case for Joe Gunther and the newly-formed VBI, but when high-profile people have their high-value possessions stolen, names get dropped and strings get pulled. Turns out it’s just as well they called in Joe, since once they begin investigating the case suddenly develops a body count. Between drug-dealing, burglary, financial shenanigans, ecoterrorism, sabotage and murder, there’s something deathly serious going on behind the resort’s pristine veneer.

The heroin trade is making serious inroads into Vermont, spilling across the border from Massachusetts, destroying families and ruining lives. Governor Reynolds, with one eye on re-election, decides that the VBI should be waging its own War On Drugs. Of course, it falls to Joe Gunther to draw up the battle plans. Not everyone wants to follow Gunther’s lead, though — particularly detective Sammie Martens, who launches her own undercover operation and quickly finds herself enmeshed a very unpleasant underworld. Gatekeeper takes a sober look at the problems of drug crimes and enforcement efforts.

A barn fire is the kind of mishap that can spell doom for a struggling family farm. Just one of them in a community would be a small tragedy. A series of three, though—one of which kills a teenager and a herd of dairy cows—starts to look very, very suspicious. Which makes it a job for Special Agent Gunther and the Vermont Bureau of Investigation.

While other members of the VBI run-down the local leads, Joe and Willy embark on a road-trip. The federal database of unsolved crimes turns up a connection between the MO of their arsonist and similar fires in New Jersey, where organized crime is still very much a force to be reckoned with. But why would a mafioso from the Garden State be torching barns in the green mountains of Vermont? And can Joe and Willy bring their quarry to justice before he lashes out again?

Alaska is about 68 times the size of Vermont. Its winters are colder, its mountains higher, its animals wilder and its remote places far more remote. None of which is to say that it's at all
better
than Vermont. Just different. More.

If you've yet to meet Kate Shugak, we think fans of Joe Gunther will find much to like in the often-silent Aleut investigator who rarely finds complete comfort in anything but her dog’s company. Dana Stabenow’s Edgar award winning series is now on its twentieth volume.