"A hermit dies in the hospital of a bullet he received twenty years earlier. At his mountaintop home, a skeleton with a bullet hole and a metal knee is found buried in the yard. On the way to the medical examiner's office, the hearse comes under machine gun fire. A long-hidden crime is obviously very much on someone's mind - someone who would love to destroy what little evidence remains. The serial number on the metal knee takes Joe Gunther to Chicago,...

In Brattleboro, Vermont, Joe Gunther's detective squad begins to research a hand found in the dirt at a construction site. Before long several more people are dead including one of the town's biggest drug dealers. Working in one of the worst heat waves in a decade, Gunther struggles to figure out the person behind the crimes.

""Archer Mayor's Vermont police procedurals are the best thing going..." --New York Times Book Review Across Brattleboro, Vermont, rich people (some with dark secrets) are waking up in their high security, alarm-equipped homes to find a Post-it note stuck to their bedside tables reading, "You're it." There is little sign of disturbance anywhere, nothing stolen (that anyone admits,) and only a bit of expensive food eaten as a signature. The Press...

In Brattleboro, Vermont, Lieutenant Joe Gunther juggles several cases, all of which turn out to be connected. There is the murder of a girl runaway, the disappearance of a local activist, the death of a homeless man, and the strangling of a woman due to die anyway.

In Brattleboro, Vermont, a home invasion against a prominent Asian family by Asian gang members puts Joe Gunther on the trail of an underground railroad operation that carries drugs, illegal aliens and other contraband from Canada to Boston, New York and other US cities.