📚💖 Exciting New Release Alert! Pulse is here! Join Joseph on an adventure filled with mystery and friendship.
Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules and more teasers at The Purple Booker. Anyone can play along.
“The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.”
In The Second Mouse, by Archer Mayor, Joe Gunther is on the case of an apparent natural death. Or maybe the woman drank herself to death. But Joe is suspicious of the apparently natural death of a young woman and can’t shake his doubts about the man who may have wanted her out of the picture. Is he onto something significant, or is he simply searching for drama in an otherwise uneventful case? After all, every death leaves behind its share of unanswered questions.
Meanwhile, a second storyline unfolds involving three individuals on a crime spree that appears initially unrelated to Gunther’s investigation. Until Mayor brings the two storylines together, I have absolutely no idea! I am looking forward to finding out. An intriguing case. Good characterization and a page-turner police procedural.
“What I would like to know,” Joe finally said, “is what happened to the cat.”
Archer Mayor, The Second Mouse
Summary
The Second Mouse takes Joe Gunther and his team off their Brattleboro home turf, forty-two miles west, to chip-on-its-shoulder, blue collar Bennington.
In Wilmington, VT, Gunther encounters the lifeless body of Michelle Fisher. Her corpse, pale and seemingly at peace, offers him no clues about who she was or how she died. There are no signs of violence, no disorder. Snapshots and postcards show a woman who laughed hard and lived harder.
Yet diaries reveal a rootless life marred by depression and drink. Suicide seems a reasonable conclusion, but Gunther suspects foul play. The house is for sale, after all, and Michelle was its only tenant, resisting all efforts to have her evicted. The unsavory landlord is a prime suspect, but safely equipped with an impressively air-tight alibi.
To uncover the truth about the fate of this discarded, all but forgotten woman, Gunther must follow a confusing trail of half leads and mounting crimes. He draws near to a violent and careless trio of criminals, whose leader is hell bent on making the career move of a lifetime—disregarding anyone in his way.
