by Archer Mayor
Part of Joe Gunther, book 4
First published 2013
Abraham Fuller lived alone on his mountain farm, avoiding neighbors and scraping by on what little his rocky soil would yield. When the reclusive gardener dies, Lt. Joe Gunther discovers the cause was a bullet wound from twenty years past. Fuller's death opens a homicide case that should have gone cold long ago, but someone is determined to keep old secrets buried at any cost. Gunther finds unmarked cash and a corpse hidden in Fuller's garden, proof that the hermit's isolation masked darker purposes than simple misanthropy. The investigation pulls Gunther across thousands of miles and back through decades of buried history. The trail leads to Chicago's violent summer of 1968, where the crime's true origins lie waiting. As Gunther digs deeper, he realizes that solving Fuller's murder means confronting events that powerful people believed were safely forgotten. This fourth case in the series tests Gunther's skills against an adversary willing to kill again to protect secrets from America's turbulent past.
Genres: american-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, mystery, crime, thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, suspenseful
Tropes: enemies-to-allies, hidden-past, uncovering-the-truth
Setting: Chicago, Mountain Farm
Period: 1960s, 1980s
320 pages · Kindle Edition · MarchMedia
Content warnings: murder, violence