Open Season

Open Season – By Archer Mayor

It might be due to the fact that this author is not very popular, but for some reason, the Joe Gunther mysteries have never ever been on my radar.  I discovered this author via a “Kindle Deal” and decided to give him a try.  I was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed the book, and a bit baffled that I had never heard of the author nor this series.  I’ve read a lot of “best seller” stuff that wasn’t nearly as good as this book.

I believe this book was written in the late 1980s, and a Wikipedia research tells me that the author writes about one book in this series every year.  As of 2016, he’s still going.  This means that I have a lot of catching up to do if I want to, someday, read all of these books.  If all of them are as good as this one, I certainly wouldn’t mind adding this author to my “to do” or “bucket” list.

Our protagonist is Police Lieutenant Joe Gunther.  A 50 something widower who walks us through his day to day life focusing on a present case at hand.  I was slightly reminded by Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone although Gunther isn’t nearly as sardonic as Kinsey and author Mayor isn’t nearly as descriptive as Sue Grafton (a good thing.  a VERY good thing).  In addition to focusing on a particular case, though, we start to learn about Joe Gunther the man, as well, and I’m sure future books probably dive more into his character and his personal interactions  at a deeper level.

This particular story begins with random violent acts starting to pop up around Gunther’s sleepy (fictitious?) small town.  When Gunther does some digging, he uncovers the fact that these crimes (including a murder or two) seem to somehow all be related to a murder trial that occurred a few years ago.  Many of the people who are victimized, it seems, served on the jury for that trial.   So, what is exactly going on?  Why is it the jury members?  Is someone trying to send a message that the wrong person was convicted?  So Gunther and team go into action.

There are a lot of minor players here.  A tad too many for my taste.  Many seem to be somewhat one dimensional, but with this many people, the author really doesn’t have time to delve too deep into all of their characters.  I’ll bet many of these folks show up in the later books, so we’ll probably learn more about all of these support players each go round.

The pieces to the puzzle probably fit a bit easier than they would had this been a real, true  crime, but the action is still somewhat believable.  The author really isn’t trying to “fool you” a la Jeffery Deaver.  There aren’t many “ah has” and when the book ends, you don’t necessarily feel overwhelmed by a fantastic tale with a lot of plot twists and turns, yet you do feel very satisfied with the entire story and how the events progress.

It will be interesting to see if the books grow and/or change in the future.  Give this author a try if, like me, you had never heard of him before and you’re looking for a good new series to discover.