Green Mountain Mysteries: A Taxonomy of Vermont Noir

For a small state (pop. 647,064), Vermont looms large in literature. Not only do we claim the second highest per capita number of working writers in the country, behind only Washington, D.C., but we can claim Robert Frost, Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Thompson, Shirley Jackson, Chris Bohjalian, Julia Alvarez, and Rebecca Makkai, as full- or part-time residents of our state.

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While the state has historically had an extremely low crime rate (though we have had sensational and violent murders that have rocked our communities), it has been host to many fictional horrors and murders. The landscape of Vermont lends itself well to made-up mystery. Our mountainous terrain creates a sense of remoteness, a feeling that we’re beyond the reach of many traditional forms of law enforcement. Our location at the edge of the country, just an hour or two’s drive to Quebec for most Vermonters, opens up the omnipresent possibility of escape. And our sparsely populated hills and valleys mean you may not be seen doing whatever dastardly thing you want to do. It seems like Vermont has been having a bit of a moment in the thriller space—Bestselling writers like Riley Sagar, Dervla McTiernan, Shari LaPena, and Jessa Maxwell have recently set books here, making good use of that remoteness, of our close-knit communities and our otherworldly natural beauty.

In his 1930 story/novella, The Whisperer in Darkness, H.P Lovecraft (who stayed in Vermont for short periods) establishes a version of Vermont that would take hold in readers’ imaginations, describing “the wild domed hills of Vermont” where the narrator, a folklorist and professor of literature at a Massachusetts college, arrives to meet  up with a man named Henry Akeley. Akeley claims to have important information about the discovery of the remains of strange beings washing down into the valleys in the aftermath of the 1927 flood. Lovecraft creates a sense of gothic claustrophobia in Akeley’s ancestral farmhouse and the narrator’s descriptions of Vermont as a barely tamed wilderness makes his tale of horror all the more possible — and chilling.

Twenty-one years later, the writer Shirley Jackson, who lived with her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, and their children in North Bennington, Vermont while he was teaching at Bennington College, took inspiration from the mountains of Southwestern Vermont and the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts to create the eerie landscapes in her stories and novels. Her 1951 novel Hangsaman was inspired by the real-life disappearance of a Bennington College student and her classic short story The Lottery was suggested by a shopping trip out and about in North Bennington.

Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel of collegiate murder, The Secret History, was many readers’ introduction to the fourteenth state. I love the book with a white-hot passion and reread it at least once a year. Tartt, who lived in Vermont for four years while a student at Bennington College, weaves and unweaves a deconstructed murder plot, the solution revealed on the very first page, the turns of the path to get there snaring readers and not letting them go until the final, devastating word.  The novel is unrelentingly brilliant and she draws, in elegiac description, the landscape of Southwestern Vermont up against the New York border. On my frequent revisitings, I have sometimes wished that Tartt had lavished as much care and characterization on the town part of the fictional Hampden’s town and gown dynamic as she does on the gown. In many ways though, that’s the point of a novel set firmly within the consciousness of a Californian experiencing Vermont for the first time and if her Vermonters can seem one dimensionally backwards sometimes, Tartt’s poetic descriptions of the Vermont winter are so specific and so rapturous you can feel her own wonder as a Southerner experiencing the season during her time in Bennington coming off the page.

It’s always interesting to see what writers not familiar with the state do with our ingredients. A few years ago, the Burlington Free Press hilariously rated some of the astonishing number of Hallmark channel Christmas movies set in Vermont. (My takeaway is that writers should always research the governance structures of places they want to write about but do not live in; one of the many ways these movies reveal themselves as not written by locals is by assigning mayors and city councils to little towns of 1,500 people.)

And although we love the series, my family had fun speculating about why its producers tried to claim that the not-really-Vermonty-looking New England location of the boarding school in the Addams Family spinoff Wednesday was in the Green Mountain State. (“Um, I really, really like this, but why are there Pilgrims?” one of my children was heard to say.)

Actually, there seem to be quite a few novels set at fictional Vermont boarding schools, which is curious since . . . we don’t have many of them. We have a small number of public-private academies and two smaller boarding schools in the southern part of the state, but for reasons having to do with Vermont’s location, historic economy, and post-Civil War depopulation, the state is not dotted with tony or possibly spooky private secondary boarding schools the way New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut are.

My very favorite Vermont mystery and horror tales capture the odd contradictions and dichotomies of my state—its remoteness and its worldliness; its natural beauty and its stark post-industrial downtowns and renewed downtown areas; its wild forests and its manicured pastures and farmland; its frigid winters and its glorious short summers; its progressive (by reputation and—mostly—in reality) present and the shameful periods and incidents in its distant and not-so-distant past; its warm welcome and its derision of flatlanders and those who (like me) weren’t born here; its flinty independence existing side-by-side with a longstanding communitarian impulse. There are many non-resident writers who have done the work to learn about our quirky, wonderful state but I’d like to highlight some Vermont writers, whether they’ve been here for generations or a few months or years.

Here then is a non-exhaustive list of some crime fiction—or novels with crimey elements—set in Vermont and written by Vermont or Vermont-adjacent writers. Cozy, stark, gritty, dark, funny, disturbing—there’s something here for every taste:

The novels of Howard Frank Mosher

They’re not crime fiction, but Mosher’s wonderful twelve novels, set in the fictional Kingdom County, are a first stop for anyone wanting to know more about the state, its personalities, and the parts of our history we highlight and hide. Many of the novels have plenty to offer for fans of crime fiction, in particular 1977’s Disappearances, about a bootlegging father and son duo, and 1989’s wonderful A Stranger in the Kingdom (inspired by actual events) in which a Black minister arrives in a small Vermont town and is charged with adultery and murder.

The Joe Gunther series by Archer Mayor

In his thirty-three police procedurals featuring Vermont Bureau of Investigation detective Joe Gunther, Mayor has crisscrossed the state (and sometimes beyond), finding confounding murders for his protagonist to solve. The pleasures of the series are many and many readers around the world have been introduced to Vermont and Joe’s home of Brattleboro through the books. Joe is an imperfect and sympathetic protagonist and the cast of characters contains friends, neighbors, and fellow investigators of Joe’s who have come to feel like family to Mayor’s readers. The novels don’t bow to Vermonty stereotypes, instead exploring a grittier side of our hamlets than the one found in tourism brochures, and his characters inhabit real towns, cities, and landscapes representing a broad swathe of the state’s residents.

The Canaan Series, I Am Not Who You Think I Am and other novels by Eric Rickstad

Rickstad, who lives in the Bennington area, is the author of a series and standalone novels set in his home state, as well as his latest, Lilith, about a mother seeking justice after a school shooting. The Canaan novels, set in the actual Northeast Kingdom town of Canaan, feature good investigators going after very bad killers. Rickstad’s version of Vermont is multi-layered. There are no picture-postcard scenes and his characters move about in real darkness. He writes with a critical eye but also a reverence for his home.  2021’s I Am Not Who You Think I Am is a gothic treat, set in the Bennington area and featuring a once-extravagant mansion that hides terrible secrets.

The Hector Bellevance series by Don Bredes

I really enjoyed Bredes’s three-book series, published in the 2000s, and always wished there had been more of them. Bellevance returns to his hometown in northern Vermont after a career as a homicide detective in Boston. The novels balance small-town intrigue with authentic emotional darkness as Hector, appointed town constable in the first novel, solves mysteries, grows vegetables, dates and then marries the town’s reporter, and learns that, as Robert Frost wrote, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

The Sleepwalker by Chris Bohjalian

The work of bestseller Bohjalian has long spanned genres and categories, but his breakout hit Midwives, is set in Vermont and he has set books in his home state throughout his career. 2017’s The Sleepwalker, set in a fictional Vermont village, is perhaps the novel most firmly within the crime category. The daughter of a missing woman who was a habitual sleepwalker gets too close to the investigation into her mother’s disappearance. Bohjalian channels Hitchcock, using the trappings of small town Vermont and the natural landscape of Addison County to ratchet up the tension.

Jennifer McMahon’s suspense novels

McMahon, who was until recently a Vermont resident, has set most of her thrillers in the state. Many have supernatural elements and she uses the region’s history in powerful ways, dredging up mystery and murder from the past to populate the present with ghosts. Her characters are complicated and beautifully drawn and she is especially interested in children and young people and the way childhood trauma can stalk us as adults.

The Shana Merchant series by Tessa Wegert

Connecticut author Wegert’s series is actually set in the Thousand Islands region of upstate New York, but her wonderful protagonist, New York State Senior Investigator Shana Merchant, grew up in Swanton, Vermont, and Wegert, who was raised just over the border from Vermont in Quebec, captures the particular feel of the town, the specifics of border-spanning Lake Champlain, and the surrounding landscape on Vermont’s boundary with Quebec. Vermont also provides much of the origin story for Shana’s narrative arc, in ways I won’t detail for fear of spoiling her twisty plots. The sixth Shana Merchant mystery, The Coldest Case, comes out in November.

The Edie Brown series by Trish Esden

Edie Brown, an art and antiques dealer (like Esden), returns to her family home in northern Vermont after a scandal involving her mother and solves mysteries related to rare and stolen objects. Esden knows her subject well and Edie’s explorations provide an in-depth look at contemporary Vermont, as well as the state’s multi-faceted history.

We Love to Entertain by Sarah Strohmeyer

Strohmeyer, the author of the Bubbles Yablonsky series, as well as many other works of fiction and suspense, sets her home renovation show thriller in the fictional town of Snowden, Vermont, uncovering long-held secrets amongst the townspeople. She pokes delicious fun at reality show culture, writes with authority about the administration and business dealings of a small Vermont town, and readily captures the dynamics between locals and out-of-staters interested in cheap rural real estate.

The Mercy Carr and Troy Warner series by Paula Munier

Munier, who lives just over the border in New Hampshire, sets her series in a fictional Vermont town based on Manchester, Vermont. Former Army MP Mercy Carr and her retired military bomb-sniffing dog  Elvis solve mysteries with game warden — and Mercy’s love interest — Troy Warner. Munier really nails the dynamic of a shire town and its relationship to the grittier places around it. Many of her plots take place in Vermont’s wilderness areas and there is great appeal here for dog lovers.

The Perfect Liar by Thomas Christopher Greene

Greene, the author of six novels and a recent collection of essays, and the founder of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, sets this domestic thriller in Burlington, Vermont’s largest city. A newly married couple who are keeping secrets from each other find that their pasts have followed them to Vermont when a strange note, reading I Know Who You Are, appears on their door.

And two books not out yet by Vermont authors:

Vermont author Margot Harrison, who has written four YA novels, makes her adult debut with The Midnight Club. It isn’t out until September, but it has a really compelling concept: in order to solve the long-ago murder of one of their own, a group of friends who went to college together in Vermont meet for a reunion and take a drug that allows you to relive your memories.

Also out in September is Vermont author Kara Lacey’s Caught on Camera, about a grieving widow who moves to a fictional village in Vermont and joins a local camera club. This sounds like a fun take on the cozy, village mystery.

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