I picked this book up more or less at random from among the Archer Mayor books on offer at the Public Library to read as part of my Bump Memorial Library research. (I have been rereading sample books from a number of mystery writers whose series we/I have enjoyed in the past — and, in some cases, am still enjoying — to decide whether I should include a "delegate" copy from the series in the BML.) Glancing at the liner notes, I thought that I had missed this Joe Gunther outing, but — no — we had read it a long time ago...This was the one where Joe is working a cold case (a robbery in which the store owner is assualted and dies of his injuries) that he had first worked as a new officer on the Brattleboro police force. At that time, his wife was dying of cancer and revisiting the case brings up all kind of difficult emotions. Gail is running for the senate, and we see the hand writing on the wall for their relationship. And Joe meets a bartender (in Glouchester, Mass when he is trying to track down a man that they suspected of having committed the original crime) who (SPOILER ALERT) will eventually fill the relationship void.We both decided that Archer Mayor did make the cut and that we should, indeed, include a "delegate" Joe Gunter novel in the library. Mayor has a new book, PROOF POSITIVE, coming out this fall, and I have pre-ordered it from amazon with the idea that it could be the representative Gunther. (Maybe not, though... it sounds like this one is set largely in Philadelphia, so the signature Vermont setting will be missing...)29. MemoryWalk: we are walking up the main street in Fort St. John (the main street of our youth) and approaching the Marshall-Wells store (no longer there) when the door bursts open and a young man stumbles out onto the sidewalk. His clothes are bloody and he is carrying a cardboard box full of paper, some of which is caught by the wind and blows off down the street. As the man hurries away, we hear screams from inside the store and go in to find a man wearing a Marshall-Wells pinny laying in a pool of blood on the floor.
Set in Brattleboro, Vermont, The Surrogate Thief explores yet another facet of the life of Joe Gunther, head of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation. An unassuming, character-driven police procedural, the book asks difficult questions about how one deals with past demons when justice lies in the balance. If you're looking for a procedural full of serial killers, this isn't it. It's Vermont, after all, and Joe's a compassionate and introspective guy__perhaps too much so. A few critics complained about the procedural's oozing pathos; do we need to know every sad detail of Joe's emotional life? Yet The Surrogate Thief once again reveals Mayor's deep understanding of human emotion and intuition__important qualities, after all, for a detective. This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.
What do You think about The Surrogate Thief (2005)?
I read Chat just prior to The Surrogate Thief. Unfortunately, the author uses similar circumstances in both to bring the guilty parties into light.
—Claudia
I like Mayor's books best when he sticks to New England. In this one Joe Gunther has to deal with a new clue to an old unsolved case that occurred during a painful time in his life. I was hoping he'd fall for the Gloucester bartender though, because I don't like Gail much.
—Steve Clark
Oh so much promise! Yet oh so disappointing! Here's why. We never meet the bad guy! The premise of this novel in Mayor's Joe Gunther series is that elements of a modern crime dredge up a 30-year old case for Gunther. He and his team then solve an old cold case as well as handle current crimes related to that cold case. As the solution unfolds, the reader finds out who's responsible for the old crime. We "meet" this criminal in only a single scene in which the bad guy says nothing. Mayor, in fact, does not develop this bad guy's character at all beyond a surface physical description. This gives the case's resolution a horrible sense of boredom. The reader is not invested in either the original case (since it's all told through Gunther's recollections) or the modern-day ramifications. The novel is thus a bit unfocused and aimless.Having read some of the Mayor's Gunther novels that come after this one, I see how the author used this novel to set up later ones. By itself, however, it is weak and not a good representation of the author's work.
—Robyn
