Borderlines

Borderlines - Archer Mayor 

Unless you own a Kindle, you might not be familiar with this author. I only say this because Kindle offers a lot of his books at a discount rate at times, and you can even read many of them on the “Kindle Unlimited” program (these are a select group of titles that Kindle allows Amazon Subscribers to read for free – 1 book per month).

This author has written a series of books that revolve around Detective Joe Gunther. Gunther resides in the Northeastern part of the United States. I’m guessing he’s about 50-ish, a widower, and pretty good at what he does. This is the second book of the series.  The author tells his tales in first person, and I’m guessing that as he writes more of these stories, we learn more about Gunther, and events in his personal life probably evolve within the pages as well. Not an uncommon feature with writers of detective stories.

As Gunther is heading out of town to work on a special assignment, he’s sidetracked when he goes back to his hometown. Apparently there’s a strange environmental “cult” that now resides there, and they have quite the effect on the community. They don’t seem to be particularly harmful, and as long as no laws are broken and these people mostly keep to themselves, conflicts can be mostly avoided.

Things go awry when an older couple show up in town and demand their daughter back from the cult. They claimed she was kidnapped. The cult, of course, denies it.  Next thing you know, there’s a fire within the cult at one of the houses that kills several people. A couple of murders later, and you have a full-fledged crime story to unravel. So Gunther, along with several other police types do what needs to be done. There’s a lot of locals to interact with, a lot of cult members that are rather tight-lipped, and a lot of information about the people in question that start to slowly unravel.  There’s even a lot of unnecessary banter between Gunther and a local girl. There’s an attraction there, but things don’t really go anywhere. I guess this is common when you have a widowed detective as your main character. You have to have some sort of romantic attraction somewhere. Right? It’s only human nature.

Overall a very good story. The author’s first book was about of the same caliber. I can’t say that this book was earth-shattering, nor am I rushing out to read more of these stories.  Still, though, I would say that these books are far better than the average of the same genre, and when one can obtain the book at somewhat of a discounted rate, what do you have to lose?