Joe Gunther, a continuing character who is a member of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation, searches for the killer of 32-year old male pedophile. Joe also tries to help his girlfriend Lyn Silva find out what happened to her father and brother who vanished from their boat off the New England coast. Not as engaging as other Gunther stories I've read, but still good. Joe is a good, solid character. This is the twentieth entry in Archer Mayor's long-running series featuring Joe Gunther who, through the years, has graduated from being a police officer in Brattleboro, Vermont, to his current position as head of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation.A Brattleboro low-life named Wayne Castine is brutally murdered. Castine has a reputation as a child molester and no one is mourning his passing. Still, the case gets handed off to the VBI and Joe's team begins an exhaustive investigation that comes to focus on the members of a highly dysfunctional Brattleboro family.At the same time, Gunther's new girlfriend, Lyn Silva, is still reeling from bad news that Joe brought her at the end of the previous book. Lyn's family had long believed that her father and brother had died in a storm at sea. But Joe discovered their fishing boat, which was not at the bottom of the sea after all. It now appears that the father and brother may have been engaged in some sort of criminal enterprise. Lyn is shattered by the news and begins her own investigation, determined to discover the truth about her father and brother.Joe is torn between his responsibility to the investigation and his affection for Lyn, and he winds up alternating back and forth between the investigation in Vermont and Lyn's crusade up in Maine. Surprisingly, for someone who has been so responsible through the first nineteen books, Gunther winds up slighting his obligation to his team at the VBI and leaving the team somewhat rudderless while he rushes to Lyn's assistance. The reader is left to wonder whether this division of his attention will allow one or both of the investigations to be compromised.This has always been one of my favorite series, but I confess that this was not one of my favorite books in it. It was somewhat jarring to see Joe acting in such an uncharacteristic fashion, and personally I am not nearly as fond of his new love interest as I was of his long-running girlfriend, Gail. In attempting to uncover the truth about what happened to her father and brother, Lyn acts in ways that often strain credulity, and on several occasions behaves stupidly. It's like the horror movie where the nubile young blonde who's at home alone goes down into the dark basement in the middle of the night when a child of five knows that Freddy Krueger will be hiding behind the damned furnace. By the second or third time Lyn did something like this, I was beginning to lose patience.That said, this is still a good read, and the rest of the cast more than makes up for the difficulty that one might have in warming up to Lyn Silva. If Mayor had dropped the second story line, relegated Lyn to a member of the supporting cast, and concentrated more on the investigation of Castine's murder, it would have been even better.
What do You think about The Price Of Malice (2009)?
Two mysteries in one, but neither seemed particularly engaging. Not one of Mayor's better books.
—tayjplay40
Has characters like no book I have ever read!
—Aby
