Good read slips a little

Joe has apparently (at last) found true love with Beverly Hillstrom, Vermont’s chief medical examiner. Beverly has appeared briefly before in Gunther tales, and while she and Joe have had a respectful professional relationship (she is not only beautiful but smart as a whip), the pair have never been intimately involved.

Beverly’s daughter, Rachel, a UVM grad student, is writing a graduate paper and, in connection with that, has made the acquaintance of Ben Kendall, a troubled Vietnam vet. Ben is reclusive in the extreme and is the world’s ultimate packrat. His home in Dummerston is filled with accumulated mechanical gadgets. When Ben is found dead, Beverly, at Rachel’s urging, asks Joe to investigate the causa mortis.

Joe, Sammy and Willy, Joe’s associates at the Vermont Bureau of Investigation (the author’s invention), agree to investigate on Rachel’s behalf.

It appears that Ben was in the Army Signal Corps as a photographer. On patrol one day, the squad entered a quiet Vietnamese village. The commanding officer, now a U.S. senator (party affiliation and state not disclosed), rapes and kills a local woman and then murders or buys the silence of squad members who witnessed the atrocity. Ben, who filmed the event, is severely wounded in the “friendly fire” and recovers — but what has become of his film?

The senator employs a couple of button men and later a female tigress to find the film. They leave a trail of bodies in their quest for the film. Joe quickly catches on to what’s afoot and lays elaborate traps for the baddies, who seem always one step ahead of Joe and able to turn the tables on him. Each time, though, Joe draws closer, not only to the thugs but the felonious senator as well.

It’s a good, uncomplicated tale, with probably too many coincidences, but it holds the reader’s attention.

“Proof Positive” is a scant 291 pages. It could easily be 50 pages more, given Mayor’s talent for creating atmosphere. In his earlier works, e.g. Bellows Falls, when Joe worked for the Brattleboro Police Department, his word pictures of the gritty underlay of Vermont put the reader at the scene. You weren’t reading about a time or place; you were there. In “Proof Positive,” instead of creating a time and place with its own distinctive aura, Joe, Sammy and Willie, alone or together, bounce all over Vermont, New Hampshire and even, of all places, North Philadelphia, but no where in all of these peregrinations does the reader feel a sense of participation.

Similarly, the characters other than Joe are narrowly drawn, without subtlety or nuance. Here, more really would have been better.

Still, it was good to reunite with Joe and his pals. The plot is original, the pace is fast, the action continuous — in all, a good read with a sense that it should or could have been more.

Edward Frey lives in Stowe. Comment on this review here, or email letters to news@stowereporter.com.