"THE MARBLE MASK" by Archer Mayor (B)

This Joe Gunther murder mystery is Archer Mayor's eleventh in his series about the middle-aged Brattleboro policeman who revels in the usually quiet and bucolic New England life in Vermont. This is the third Joe Gunther murder mystery that I have read in what I have found to be a rather enjoyable series. I also enjoy the New England locales, which Mayor describes in great detail, all of which evidences his love for the area.

Joe Gunther is a no-nonsense style cop who plays things pretty much by the book and has a personality to match, so the stories are not so much about his personality as they are about the murder, or murders, and the procedures that he uses to solve them. It normally falls to his VBI associates like Sammy Martens and Willy Kunkle to give us characters with colorful personalities.

Each Gunther story is more or less a crime procedural manual, which is fine with me, as this is usually reasonably interesting. However, this particular story has a set of circumstances that is so far off the wall that I spent more than half the novel just trying to "get it," which for me means trying to figure out where Mayor is going to go with the crazy setup for this story and why I should care about it.

Every good mystery story demands that you mentally try to jump ahead of the author's characters in an effort to figure it out, but the setup for "the Marble Mask" is so strange that no feat of logic could account for the highly unusual set of circumstances that sets the murder investigation in motion. Even after having read the book, I still am not satisfied with the rationale for those circumstances.

A frozen body has been discovered in a crevice high on the top of Mount Mansfield, the ski mountain for which Stowe, Vermont is famous. It was found by a skier who lost his way in the fog and the snow. How likely is this to happen to be convenient to any story? Then the body is found not to be of recent vintage, but from 1946, right after the close of World War Two. Not only that, but its two legs and an arm are missing, but the arm is later found after a second sweep of the area. Sillier yet, the autopsy shows that the person hadn't died on the mountain, but instead it had been kept frozen on ice for 50 years and then for some strange reason was dropped there from an airplane during the previous several months.

What logical point could there possibly be for all of these machinations? Well, the book tries to explain it all, but with a start like this I was lost in a fog for much of the first half of the novel. Fortunately, the story picks up dramatically towards the close, but still not enough to satisfy me so that this would be a book worthy of my recommendation.

Even the title, "The Marble Mask," is confusing. While there is one in the story, it occupies all of about several paragraphs in the entire book, so it is a very minor element and almost entirely incidental to the plot.

Another problem that I had with this story was Mayor's decision to distance the killer from the possibility of being considered a suspect until the very end, with the result that many other suspects were investigated and each eventually was found to be clean. This means that every reader along with Gunther has to chase down numerous rabbit holes without having a clue as to who the real killer is. I prefer cat and mouse situations with the net tightening inexorably around a villain who appears earlier in the story, not someone who pops up at the very end in some sort of a "deux ex machina" capacity.

In this novel, long time Brattleboro policeman Joe Gunther has just been publicly recognized for his highly regarded professional capabilities by being appointed to be second in command at the newly created Vermont Bureau of Investigation, or VBI.

The thought has been to create a statewide police agency to oversee high profile cases which have overlapping jurisdictions. However, Gunther is of mixed emotions about this appointment, since all he sees are the higher-ups looking for political cover while the normal cops on the local beat will resent the VBI for coming in and stepping all over their toes and then grabbing the limelight after the cases have been solved. Gunther, a straight shooter and as far from a political animal as one could be, has an answer for all of this, but the early going will be difficult until the VBI establishes its credentials.

Fortunately, their first case is a doozy. The above mentioned "popsicle" has been discovered in a crevasse on top of Mount Mansfield, and the new VBI team is called in to help Stowe Police Chief Frank Auerbach with the investigation. Though initially wary, Gunther slowly wins his trust.

It turns out to be that of Jean Deschamps, the former head of a criminal gang operating in Sherbrooke, Canada. Sherbrooke is just across the border from Vermont, and the Deschamps gang members started their career as smugglers during prohibition and then moved on to other equally lucrative trades.

This is a perfect example for the creation of the VBI, assuming that they can solve the case, of course, since now Gunther and his fellow officers will have to contact Gilles Lacombe at the Sureté du Quebec for help. French is the language of choice in Quebec, and Paul Spraiger, one of their new recruits, is the only VBI member fluent in the language.

Unfortunately for Gunther, Marcel Deschamps, the sole surviving son of Jean Deschamps and the elderly head of the Deschamps crime family, is hardly one to open up with a policemen, even to Gunther and his team who are only there to help solve the death of his father. He is more interested in establishing his own son, Michel, as the new head of the family.

Having the body of his long lost father suddenly discovered is only going to uncover old wounds and perhaps start internecine warfare. Bodies do start dropping, and clues point to the other gangs in the Sherbrooke area jockeying for power. Then further clues appear surprisingly well preserved back in Stowe, but the real question that bothers the VBI team is just what was the real Deschamps connection to Stowe and where his body had been all of those years. Published by Warner Brothers in 2000, and 309 pages.