Review: Three Can Keep a Secret by Archer Mayor

A Mysterious Review of Three Can Keep a Secret by Archer Mayor. A Joe Gunther Mystery.

Review summary: This is a multi-faceted mystery, the intersecting plotlines of which make for a complex investigation for Joe Gunther. And while the VBI agent looks into his cases, which do come together in a credible, really quite unexpected manner, Vermont is slowly recovering from the aftermath of 2011's Hurricane Irene. A fine entry in this series. (Click here for text of full review.)

Our rating:

Three Can Keep a Secret
Archer Mayor
A Joe Gunther Mystery
Minotaur Books (October 2013)

Publisher synopsis: Joe Gunther and his team — the Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI) — are usually called in on major cases by local Vermont enforcement whenever they need expertise and back-up. But after the state is devastated by Hurricane Irene, the police from one end of the state are taxed to their limits, leaving Joe Gunther involved in an odd, seemingly unrelated series of cases. In the wake of the hurricane, a seventeen year old gravesite is exposed, revealing a coffin that had been filled with rocks instead of the expected remains.

At the same time, an old, retired state politician turns up dead at his high-end nursing home, in circumstances that leave investigators unsure that he wasn't murdered. And a patient who calls herself "The Governor" has walked away from a state mental facility during the post-hurricane flood. It turns out that she was indeed once "Governor for a Day," over forty years ago, but that she might have also been falsely committed and drugged to keep her from revealing something that she saw all those years ago. Amidst the turmoil and the disaster relief, it's up to Joe Gunther and his team to learn what really happened with the two corpses — one missing — and what secret "The Governor" might have still locked in her brain that links them all.