FALL GUY

A murdered burglar in a stolen car leads Joe Gunther’s Vermont Bureau of Investigation team into some truly nasty places.

Despite the absence of any identification, the corpse is quickly identified as that of Don Kalfus, and the Mercedes in whose trunk he’s been found belongs to Lemuel Shaw, a New Hampshire native who returned home to live the good life after making his bundle in New York. Since a phone found on Kalfus contains images of child pornography and Angie Neal, the girl who answers the door when Joe’s task force goes looking for Lisa Rowell, the phone’s owner, is clearly the model for one of the images, the leading question immediately becomes who’s most invested in producing and consuming this smut. It’s not Lisa Rowell, who’s nothing but a fictional avatar for Kalfus. Could it be Melissa Monfet, Angie’s mother, or Trevor Buttner, her ex-con live-in? Or could it be Lemuel Shaw, whose Mercedes was stolen not from his bucolic estate but from outside the strip club he frequented—a club from which he’d been ejected that night after arguing with bouncer Don Thompson, another pseudonym for Don Kalfus? As Joe and his teammates cross back and forth between Vermont and New Hampshire finding more and more rocks to turn over, canny readers are likely to assume they know where this all is headed. But as a series of brutal revelations stacked up like wartime corpses in the last few chapters indicate, things are much worse than they anticipated.

A meticulous, professional procedural whose climax packs a wallop.