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.Archer Mayor is the author of the highly acclaimed Vermont-based series featuring detective Joe Gunther, which theChicago Tribunedescribes as the best police procedurals being written in America. He is a past winner of the New England Independent Booksellers Association Award for Best Fictionthe first time a writer of crime literature has been so honored. In 2011, Mayors 22nd Joe Gunther novel, TAG MAN, earned a place onThe New York Timesbestseller list for hardback fiction.Before turning his hand to fiction, Mayor wrote history books, the most notable of which,Southern Timberman: The Legacy of William Buchanan,concerned the lumber and oil business in Louisiana from the 1870s to the 1970s. This book was published in 1988 and very well received; it was republished as a trade paperback in 2009.Archer Mayor is a death investigator for Vermonts Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, a detective for the Windham County Sheriffs Office, the publisher of his own backlist, a travel writer for AAA, and he travels the Northeast giving speeches and conducting workshops. He has 25 years of experience as a volunteer firefighter/EMT. Mayor was brought up in the US, Canada and France and had been employed as a scholarly editor, a researcher for TIME-LIFE Books, a political advance-man, a theater photographer, a newspaper writer/editor, a lab technician forParis-Match Magazinein Paris, France, and a medical illustrator. In addition to writilC>