"CHAT" by Archer Mayor (B)

This new novel in the Joe Gunther series is about as home spun as you can get, which says a lot since all of Mayor's previous novels about Gunther take place in or near Vermont, certainly one of our more rural states. The crime element in this novel seems almost peripheral to the rapidly changing personal dynamics in Joe's life with this novel being far more introspective than the other Mayor books that I have read.

Joe's relationship with his family is brought into sharp focus as a result of a car accident involving his mother and brother that necessitates him to spend long hours at the hospital while they are in intensive care. His romantic relationships are also in a state of flux with his former girlfriend, Gail Zigman, previously having moved away to the state capital of Montpelier after being elected a state representative. Luckily for him, another lovely possibility may be coming into his life.

At the same time that Joe is preoccupied with the well being of his family, a "floater" is found in a river running through Brattleboro. The ensuing investigation will eventually lead to the dangers of sexual predators lurking in internet chat rooms. Then that car crash is discovered to have suspicious origins, and now crime has gotten personal and strikes close to home.

Author Mayor provides us with a "twofer" set of cases that run concurrently throughout the book. They are knit together from the standpoint of chronology, but when taken by themselves, both turn out to be rather thin and poorly fleshed out. I would hazard a guess that Mayor had these two plot ideas rolling around in the back of his head, so he combined them to create one novel of rather slight criminal substance with a lot of emotional gravy poured on the top.

Along with a possible crime being perpetrated against his own brother and aged mother, there is more than the usual amount of of Gunther's personal life on display. Joe spends a lot of time at the hospital visiting them while they recuperate after the accident. There he endures the pain of seeing his former long time girlfriend, Gail Zigman, who occasionally stops by to visit his mother and brother since she was once almost a member of the family. Their meetings are awkward and stilted, but still filled with the angst of what might have been.

Far more conveniently than what usually happens in real life, Lyn Silva, a female bartender in Gloucester with whom Joe had shared a few tender moments several years before while he was working on another case, decides to pull up stakes and move to Brattleboro. A relationship had ended for her there at the same time that the opportunity to buy a bar in Brattleboro had opened up. She buys the bar, but it seems that the opportunity to make a romantic play for Joe is also high on her agenda.

With romantic entanglements filling Joe's thoughts both during and after work, there is still the problem of the unidentified corpse of the middle aged man that was found in the river. Gunther has, as always, the capable assistance of his associate VBI officers Sammy Martens and Willie Kunkle to help him in the investigation. Few clues surface, no pun intended, until the autopsy comes back from Joe's good friend, Beverly Hillstrom, the chief medical examiner in Brattleboro.

Besides Kunkle and Martens, Joe has the greatly appreciated support of Brattleboro policemen Rob Burrows, who plays his alter-ego in the more sensitive aspects of the car crash investigation. Burrows makes a great front man in a situation where Joe is not only emotionally involved because of his mother and brother, but also because clues possibly point towards criminal involvement by a family bearing a grudge against him.

All of this makes for a pleasant enough read, I suppose, but Mayor's literary creation suffers from the fact that Joe Gunther is nothing more than a plodding, by the numbers cop. Stolid is the word that comes to mind. He just isn't all that interesting a character. There are no sharp edges, nothing about him that is off the wall so that he has some appeal. He is just so normal, disappointingly so. His subordinate officers, Sammy Martens and Willie Kunkle, are much more interesting characters, and part of me wishes that this novel were more about them.

Gunther is a "white bread" cop in a beautiful but homogeneous area, and I wish that there were less color to the locale and more color to Gunther. 2007, Grand Central Publishing, 326 pages.