The Surrogate Thief

In present-day Vermont, a woman kills her ex-husband with an old, second-hand gun that turns out to have a history with Detective Joe Gunther. Thirty-two years earlier, as Joe and his wife Ellen struggled with her terminal bout of cancer, local store owner Klaus Oberfeldt was robbed and beaten to death by a local thief using that same gun. Overwhelmed by Ellen’s illness, Joe’s personal grief hampered his investigation, and the suspect, Pete Shea, vanished before they could catch him. As Gunther and the Vermont Bureau of Investigation delve into this now suddenly renewed case, they discover that the political opponent of Joe’s longtime girlfriend, Gail Zigman (who is running for state senate) has close financial ties with one of the suspects in the old Oberfeldt investigation. But the deeper he digs, the deeper Joe becomes immersed in his own personal history with Ellen and with Gail, and when the Oberfeldt case takes a turn for the unexpected, Joe realizes that he is faced with a politically perilous situation—and a possibly lethal one personally.