Mountains of mystery in Vermont
The Second Mouse
By Archer Mayor
Mysterious Press, 292 pp., $24.99
Archer Mayor works days as a part-time policeman in Bellows Falls, Vt. , and as a death investigator for that state's medical examiner. He's on intimate terms with both Vermont and villainy, and the knowledge takes him to mystery-writing heaven in "The Second Mouse," his 17th -- that's right, 17th -- procedural featuring Vermont Bureau of Investigation agent Joe Gunther.
After so many books, more people doubtless have been murdered in Mayor's fictional world than in the real Green Mountain State during the Gunther series' run. But a mystery writer has to make a living. And inflated homicide rate aside, Mayor's Vermont is recognizable to anyone familiar with the state. His criminals are losers, economically, morally, or both, drawn from the stratum concealed by the gorgeous foliage and wintry white ski slopes in tourism ads.
If Vermont trails the nation in the number of murders, it also lags in prosperity. In the real Vermont, those hilly farmlands and forested back roads camouflage their share of hardscrabble living; the state's typical income has long been in the unimpressive middle of the nation's. Its political leaders have been brainstorming how to stanch the exodus of young Vermonters who are fleeing for better opportunities elsewhere. The working class here, Mayor writes, comes "with rough hands, work clothes, or homebuilt haircuts."
Two police cases unfold in "The Second Mouse," involving losers both sympathetic and not. In the first category is Michelle Fisher, whose apparent suicide kicks off the story. Her death is all the sadder for the fact that an otherwise cursed life was beginning to arc toward happiness. Daughter of a drunk who was a single mom, Michelle had battled the bottle herself and rifled through four husbands while watching a son die and a daughter come to hate her, and (not surprisingly) sunk into depression. Near the end of her life, she'd finally found a good, loving man, only to have him succumb to a heart attack. When Gunther learns that the dead boyfriend's father had been bitterly feuding with Michelle while trying to have her evicted, he wonders whether she died by her own hand.
As he investigates, a separate story line follows a trio of bigger losers, a band of thieves led by Mel, an animal in human form who abuses his two partners. Mel beats his wife, Nancy, and bullies Ellis, his underling. He tells his wife that she's a "stupid cow" who "couldn't make money lying on your back. You are that dumb." That's when he's in a noble mood. In his less enlightened moments, he discovers that killing people gives him a high. Mayor can write monsters as well as Bram Stoker , and Mel would give Dracula the creeps.
Ellis is another story. A loser, to be sure; who else would hang out with Mel? But Mayor gives him a crummy childhood like Michelle's, and unlike his thuggish boss, Ellis retains some humanity. Mayor writes that Nancy stares at Ellis's face, "already weather-beaten in his late thirties, a mix of maturity and childishness. His was like the heart of a boy beating inside a tired bear of a man."
These two plot strands intersect with Gunther, and culminate in a book-ending twist. On the way, relish a mystery writer who's also a working cop and writes believably about the police mind-set. The first person to whom Gunther turns for information about Michelle's death? Michelle. He seeks some "subtle form of sign language" from her lifeless body, in what Mayor dubs the initial "interviews with the deceased."
