Review: ‘The Fall Guy’ accurately portrays police procedures

“Fall Man” by Archer Mayor (Minotaur)

A Mercedes sedan, stolen a number of days earlier in New Hampshire, is discovered deserted in Vermont. It’s filled with stolen items from a two-state crime spree. And within the trunk, police discover a physique.

The sufferer seems to be the thief, a low-life named Don Kalfus.

Included among the many loot are six cell telephones. On one in every of them, police discover pornographic photos of a pre-teen woman. On one other, they uncover a clue to a decade-old youngster abduction that was by no means solved. So from the very begin of “The Fall Man,” Archer Mayor’s thirty third police procedural that includes Joe Gunther, Commander of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation, the hero has a posh case on his fingers.

Amongst different issues, he must be taught who Kalfus had been stealing from, whether or not one in every of his victims may need killed him, who the kid within the pictures is, and tips on how to use the sudden clue to crack the outdated abduction case.

Moreover, as a result of the crimes occurred over vast swaths of Vermont and New Hampshire, Gunther and his group, an ensemble forged acquainted to Mayor’s readers, should negotiate delicate jurisdictional points amongst a number of native and state legislation enforcement businesses.

Mayor has a well-deserved fame for precisely portraying police procedures, from investigative strategies to bureaucratic wrangling. That ability, sharpened in his day job as an investigator for the Vermont Workplace of the Chief Medical Examiner, is on full show in “The Fall Man.”

Sometimes, nevertheless, he could take this a bit too far. For instance, the way in which Gunther negotiates the jurisdictional points would have been attention-grabbing in the event that they grew contentious, however he’s so good at it that the creator’s meticulous accounts briefly sluggish the suspenseful plot to a crawl.

As a result of the first sufferer, Kalfus, is on no account sympathetic and since practically everybody the investigators encounter of their work is a lowlife, the reader is unlikely to develop an emotional stake within the consequence. The novel’s major attraction lies in an appreciation of the ability with which Gunther and his group work to methodically tie up all of the unfastened ends of this complicated case.

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Bruce DeSilva, winner of the Thriller Writers of America’s Edgar Award, is the creator of the Mulligan crime novels together with “The Dread Line.”