Occam's Razor (Joe Gunther Series, Vol. 10) - Softcover

Archer Mayor is the author of the highly acclaimed Vermont-based series featuring detective Joe Gunther, which the Chicago Tribune describes as “the best police procedurals being written in America.” He is a past winner of the New England Independent Booksellers Association Award for Best Fiction―the first time a writer of crime literature has been so honored. In 2011, Mayor’s 22nd Joe Gunther novel, TAG MAN, earned a place on The New York Times bestseller list for hardback fiction.

Before turning his hand to fiction, Mayor wrote history books, the most notable of which, Southern Timberman: The Legacy of William Buchanan, concerned the lumber and oil business in Louisiana from the 1870s to the 1970s. This book was published in 1988 and very well received; it was republished as a trade paperback in 2009.

Archer Mayor is a death investigator for Vermont’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, a detective for the Windham County Sheriff’s Office, the publisher of his own backlist, a travel writer for AAA, and he travels the Northeast giving speeches and conducting workshops. He has 25 years of experience as a volunteer firefighter/EMT. Mayor was brought up in the US, Canada and France and had been employed as a scholarly editor, a researcher for TIME-LIFE Books, a political advance-man, a theater photographer, a newspaper writer/editor, a lab technician for Paris-Match Magazine in Paris, France, and a medical illustrator. In addition to writing novels and occasional articles, Mayor gives talks and workshops all around the country, including the Bread Loaf Young Writers conference in Middlebury, Vermont, and the Colby College seminar on forensic sciences in Waterville, Maine.

Mayor’s critically-acclaimed series of police novels feature Lt. Joe Gunther of the Brattleboro, Vermont, police department. The books, which have been appearing about once a year since 1988, have been published in five languages (if you count British), and routinely gather high praise from such sources as The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New Yorker, and others, often appearing on their “ten best” yearly lists.

Whereas many writers base their books only on interviews and scholarly research, Mayor’s novels are based on actual experience in the field. The result adds a depth, detail and veracity to his characters and their tribulations that has led The New York Times to call him “the boss man on procedures”.

It was colder without the snow, and felt darker as a result. Even with the starlight and the feeble seepage from the streetlamps around the corner, my eyes took longer to adjust than I expected.
The police officer at the bottom of the Arch Street alley looked up at me quizzically as I hesitated beside my car, my hands burrowing deep inside my pockets. “You okay, Lieutenant?” He was stringing a yellow “Police Line” tape across the way.
I shuddered and nodded, walking down the paved incline, careful of its neglected, broken surface. “Sure, Bobby. Still half asleep.”
He lifted the tape to let me pass. “Know what you mean. I been on nights for a week already. Still can’t get used to it.”
He was fresh from the academy, eager and curious, and if statistics were any guide, either destined to learn the ropes with us, and then enter the private sector, disillusioned and bored, or angle a job with the state police, assuming he passed their scrutiny.
“Who’s here already?” I asked him.
“Detectives Klesczewski and Tyler. Officer Lavoie’s with them. Sheila Kelly’s closing the other end off.”
I smiled at his titling everyone except Sheila. It wasn’t sexist. She’d been his supervisor, before we’d let him loose on his own. She was the reverse of the trend, ten years with the Burlington PD, come to us in search of a slightly mellower pace. Bobby looked to her as a kid might to an older sister.
I continued to the corner, where the Main Street buildings above and behind me showed their backs to the train tracks and the Connecticut River beyond. Typical of many old, red-brick New England towns, Brattleboro, Vermont faced away from the serenity and beauty of the river, having chosen well over a hundred-and-fifty years ago to regard both it and the railroad paralleling it as unsightly commercial conduits. In its heyday, this stretch of ground, unseen by the gentry, had been a coarse and bustling string of loading docks and receiving bays, feeding businesses two floors above, whose windows had glittered with the primped and polished end results.
Now the area was forlorn and ignored, a parking place for dumpsters, the homeless, and for teenagers seeking illicit time alone. High overhead, out of sight in the gloom, dotting the curved, fortress-like wall following the river’s bend, were hundreds of dingy rear apartments, an increasing number of which were being transformed into tastefully renovated lofts or rendered by the town’s excess of psychologists and therapists into peaceful, sunlit havens-drawn to the very scenery that their predecessors had ignored. Most, however, still belonged to the marginally solvent-welfare dwellers holed up in small, dark, cluttered dens, surrounded by commerce, and benefiting from none of it.
With theatrical abruptness, a tripod-mounted halogen lamp burst the darkness ahead of me with a brief electrical hiss. It was facing away from me, down and across the tracks, so the effect wasn’t blinding, but more fancifully melodramatic. Its harsh light destroyed any subtlety or nuance, revealing everything in its arc in angular, brittle starkness – while consigning everything outside it to simple nonexistence. The soiled, damaged brick walls; the cinder-stained gravel of the railroad bed; the parallel crescent of gleaming tracks, and the flat black slab of river water beyond ― were all briefly frozen in that initial flash of light, like a startled, disheveled partygoer caught in the glare of an instant camera. And just as quickly, it all became mere background to the item at center stage-and the reason for our gathering in the middle of a freezing January night.
Perpendicular to the outermost track, his feet toward the river, lay a man in a thick, long, dirty coat. He had no head or hands-they’d all been resting on the track when the last train had passed by, and what was left of them didn’t merit much description. But they lent the scene its one source of bright color, and to the entire picture a grim sense of purpose.
Standing over the body was Ron Klesczewski, that night’s detective on call. J. P. Tyler, our forensics man, had just plugged in the lamp.
He moved away from its glare and joined me in the darkness, like a technician stepping offstage to check his work. “I didn’t see calling the paramedics. Got hold of everybody else-the ME, the SA’s office, more backup. Gail not on tonight?”
Gail Zigman was a deputy state’s attorney, and the woman I lived with. “No,” I answered. “I forgot to ask who was when I left.” I gestured with my chin down the tracks. “What’ve we got?”
Tyler shrugged. “Little early to tell, and I don’t want to do too much before the ME gets here, but it looks like a bum who ran out of rope.”
“Suicide?” I asked mildly.
“Probably. Although you don’t usually find them with their hands on the track.”
Before moving any closer, I said, more to myself than to him, “Unless he was already dead.”