by Archer Mayor
Part of Joe Gunther, book 24
First published 2013
Hurricane Irene tears through Vermont, leaving devastation and chaos in its wake. Joe Gunther and his Vermont Bureau of Investigation team find themselves stretched thin across multiple strange cases. A seventeen year old grave lies exposed by floodwaters, its coffin filled with rocks instead of human remains. An elderly retired politician dies under suspicious circumstances at his upscale nursing home. Meanwhile, a mental patient calling herself The Governor disappears from a state facility during the flooding. She once served as Governor for a Day over forty decades ago, but may have been wrongfully committed and medicated to silence her about something she witnessed years before. As Gunther digs deeper, he discovers these seemingly separate incidents connect through a buried secret. The missing corpse, the suspicious death, and The Governor's suppressed memories all tie together in ways that threaten to expose long hidden truths. Gunther must unravel what really happened while managing disaster relief efforts across the storm ravaged state.
Genres: suspense, mystery, contemporary, thriller
Vibes: fast-paced, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Vermont
Period: 21st-century
324 pages · Hardcover · Minotaur Books