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Archer Mayor

Archer Mayor

  • In Archer Mayor’s Fall Guy, a body found in the trunk of a stolen car leads Joe Gunther and his team to crucial evidence in an infamous unsolved case from years past.

    A high-end stolen car is discovered in Vermont. A car filled with stolen items from a far-flung two stage burglary spree. But it’s what is in the trunk that brings Joe Gunther and his team from the Vermont Bureau of Investigation. In the trunk is the body of burglar in question—one Don Kalfus. Complicating matters, while the body was found in Vermont, it appears he was probably killed in the next state over, New Hampshire.

    The task force charged with finding out why Kalfus is murdered soon faces another problem. Within the pile of stolen cell phones found in the car is evidence of a notorious unsolved child abduction case from years earlier.

    Now the seemingly simple case has become more complicated and deadly, leading Gunther’s team to be pulled from the New Hampshire coast to near the Canadian border as they attempt to find and capture the psychopath responsible for a tangled, historical web of misery, betrayal, and loss.

  • The death of a local millionaire becomes suspicious when Joe Gunther learns that he was not who he claimed.

    A year ago, local philanthropist and millionaire Nathan Lyon died a natural death in his sprawling mansion, a 150,000-square-foot converted mill, surrounded by his loving, attentive family. Or so it seemed at the time. Now Joe Gunther and his Vermont Bureau of Investigation team has discovered that almost nothing about that story was true. Nathan Lyon was actually Nick Bianchi from Providence, Rhode Island. His money came from Mafia-tainted sources. And his family now seems to be dying themselves and their deaths are now revealed to be murders.

    As Gunther’s team desperately works to uncover what is going on at the Mill, who is responsible, and what they are trying to accomplish, Joe himself travels to Rhode Island to look into the original source of the money. While the police are doing their jobs, private investigator Sally Kravitz teams up with reporter Rachel Reiling to expose the truth behind this tangled and expanding web of duplicity, greed, and obsession. Having betrayed many, it’s no surprise that Nathan Lyon was a marked man. But now Gunther has to figure out who, among the many, killed him, and stop them before their killing spree claims another.

  • In Archer Mayor’s intriguing new Vermont-based mystery, The Orphan’s Guilt, a straightforward traffic stop snowballs into a homicide investigation after Joe Gunther and his fellow investigators peel back layer upon layer of history and personal heartbreak to learn a decades-old hidden truth.

    John Rust is arrested for drunk driving by a Vermont state trooper. Looking to find mitigating circumstances, John’s lawyer hires private eye Sally Kravitz to look into the recent death of John’s younger brother, purportedly from a childhood brain injury years earlier. But what was the nature of that injury, and might its mechanism point more to murder than to natural causes? That debate brings in Joe Gunther and his team.

    Gunther’s efforts quickly uncover an ancient tale of avarice, betrayal, and vengeance that swirled around the Rust boys growing up. Their parents and the people they consorted with―forgotten, relentless, but now jolted to action by this simple set of circumstances―emerge with a destructive passion. All while the presumably innocent John Rust mysteriously vanishes with no explanation.

  • The Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI) has been pulled onto three cases at the same time; meanwhile, VBI head Joe Gunther has to take time off to care for his ailing mother.

    Those cases are now in the hands of the individual investigators. Sammie Martens is assigned a murder case. The victim is a young woman, the roommate of the daughter of medical examiner Beverly Hillstrom. A recent transplant from Albany, New York, Sammie must find out what put a hit man on the trail of this seemingly innocent young woman.

    Lester Spinney takes over a famous cold case, a double murder where a state trooper and a motorist were killed in an exchange of gunfire. Or so it has seemed for years. When Lester is told that the motorist’s fingerprints were planted on the gun he’s supposed to have fired, it opens the question―who really killed the state trooper?

    Willy Kunkle’s case starts with a child’s discovery of three teeth on a railroad track, leading eventually to a case of possible sabotage against critical military equipment.

    In cases that lead the team all over Vermont and nearby, Archer Mayor once again shows why his novels featuring Joe Gunther and the VBI team are among the finest in crime fiction today.

  • Joe Gunther and the VBI team are investigating a murder and an arson case—both potentially related to an outbreak of Ebola.

    When the body of a young woman is found near a trail at a popular ski mountain, the case falls to Joe Gunther and his team at the Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI). They quickly have a suspect, Mick Durocher, and a confession, but not everyone on the team is convinced. Despite Mick’s ready admission, investigators quickly sense there might be more going on than is immediately apparent.

    At the same time, a large local business is being targeted with escalating acts of vandalism—a warehouse fire, a vandalized truck, a massive cooling system destroyed—resulting in loss of life. And either by coincidence or not, Mick Durocher, the self-confessed murderer, was once employed by this very company.

    These two puzzling cases—now possibly connected—are further complicated by the sidelining of a key member of VBI, Willy Kunkle, who undergoes surgery at a hospital that appears to be having an unlikely—and suspiciously timed—outbreak of Ebola.

    Joe and his team pursue these cases, uncovering motives that might link them, while proving that trust betrayed can be a toxic virus, turning love into murderous loathing. Indeed, behind the mayhem and murder, Joe must uncover a tragic history before another victim dies.

  • The murder of a small-time drug dealer snowballs into the most complex case ever faced by Joe Gunther and his VBI team.

    It is said a bright and clear bomber’s moon is the best asset to finding one’s target. But beware what you wish for: what you can see at night can also see you, often with dire consequences.

    Two young women form the heart of this tale. One is an investigative reporter, the other a private investigator. Uneasy allies from completely different walks of life, they work together―around and sometimes against Joe Gunther and his VBI cops―in an attempt to connect the murders of a small-town drug dealer; a smart, engaging, fatally flawed thief; and the tangled, political, increasingly dark goings on at a prestigious prep school.

    While Gunther and the VBI set about solving the two murders, Sally Kravitz and Rachel Reiling combine their talents and resources to go where the police cannot, from working undercover at Thorndike Academy, to having clandestine meetings with criminals for their insider’s knowledge of Vermont’s unexpectedly illicit underbelly.

    But there is a third element at work. A malevolent force, the common link in all this death and chaos, is hard at work sowing mayhem to protect its ancient, vicious, very dark roots.

  • News travels fast in the small state of Vermont. In this tight-knit society, police officers and investigators proudly maintain a kinship that transcends the boundaries of their jurisdictions. When an unidentified body is found in the peaceful town of Brattleboro, local police and the Vermont Bureau of Investigation both appear at the scene.

    But before investigator Joe Gunther can begin to gather evidence of murder, a family emergency sends him to his hometown, where the lives of his mother and brother have suddenly been threatened. Gunther reaches out to a network of police officers who know him only by name and reputation as he attempts to discover the source of this imminent danger.

    Meanwhile, his investigative team chases an elusive murderer who has no apparent ties to the victim. In a state that is more like a neighborhood community, secrets are difficult to keep, and it’s sometimes impossible to know who can be trusted. To save those he holds closest to his heart, Gunther soon finds himself opposing criminals more menacing than any he has ever encountered.

  • A legend among Vermont cops, Joe Gunther has solved more local whodunits than a whole squad of detectives. But his latest case takes him and his team off their Brattleboro home turf, forty-two miles west, to chip-on-its-shoulder, blue-collar Bennington.

    On the edge of town, Gunther encounters the lifeless body of Michelle Fisher. Her corpse, pale and seemingly at peace, offers him no clues about who she was or how she died. There are no signs of violence, no disorder. Snapshots and postcards show a woman who laughed hard and lived harder. Yet diaries reveal a rootless life marred by depression and drink. Suicide seems a reasonable conclusion, but Gunther suspects foul play. The house is for sale, after all, and Michelle was its only tenant—one who resisted all efforts to have her evicted. The unsavory landlord is a prime suspect but is safely equipped with an impressively air-tight alibi.

    To uncover the truth about the fate of this discarded, all-but-forgotten woman, Gunther must follow a confusing trail of half leads and mounting crimes. He draws near to a violent and careless trio of criminals whose leader is hellbent on making the career move of a lifetime—and willing to step on anyone who might get in his way.

  • With Joe Gunther and his Vermont Bureau of Investigation team spread thin on assignment everywhere, from the remote dairy country of Northwest Vermont to the slums of Newark, New Jersey, they’re pushed to their absolute limit when a string of serial arsons across the Green Mountain State evolves into the most shocking series of murders the bucolic region has ever known.

  • Over the years investigator Joe Gunther has battled drug pushers and corporate swindlers, grappled with environmental conspirators, and foiled gangs and home invaders. But while usually successful in his fight for the future of the small town of Brattleboro, Vermont, Gunther hasn’t always come out on top.

    Thirty years earlier store owner Klaus Oberfeldt was robbed and beaten senseless. When Klaus died six months later, a case of assault and battery became first-degree murder. The guilty man eventually appeared to be a well-known, small-time crook, but enough time had elapsed for him to vanish. Gunther, distracted by his wife’s losing struggle with cancer in the same hospital where Klaus was slipping from life, did something that would plague him for the rest of his career: he let the case go cold, burying it in the past along with his private sorrows.

    Now serendipitously reopened, the Oberfeldt investigation forces Gunther to revisit ancient history and open old wounds. Torn between righting the past and confronting his demons, the veteran cop faces the most personal and dangerous case of his career. For somewhere on the idyllic Brattleboro streets stalks a long-lost murderer who never quite disappeared—and with Joe’s renewed interest, now has good reason to kill again.

  • When, in the course of a week, a young heroin addict is gunned down while trying to rob a convenience store, a narcotics dealer is found hanging from a bridge, and the granddaughter of a political bigwig dies of an overdose, Vermont detective Joe Gunther vows to stop the flow of drugs into his beloved state.

  • The harrowing call comes from the NYPD: Willy’s ex-wife Mary has been found dead in her Lower East Side apartment, and Willy is asked to identify the body. Torn from his beloved Vermont, Willy returns to the city of his hard-drinking youth with misgivings that deepen when he sees Mary’s sad corpse on a gurney. Because of a fresh puncture mark in her arm, the police think she overdosed. But Willy has doubts.

    Driven by loss and guilt, Willy searches deeper and deeper into his past, to a long-ago Vietnam where he was a merciless loner known as the Sniper. Soon he will answer for his old sins … and live up to his chilling nickname.

  • An overworked sheriff and a string of condo burglaries at a luxurious ski resort have Lieutenant Joe Gunther and the newly minted Vermont Bureau of Investigation digging deep for clues. But it doesn’t take long for Joe to find the most likely thief missing and his girlfriend dead.

    As the complications mount, from drug dealing to environmental terrorism to attempted murder, Joe and his team go undercover to infiltrate the closed society of a one-company town, populated by bored millionaires and supported by a small legion of resort employees, not all of whom are what they seem.

  • Joe Gunther, a Brattleboro, Vermont, cop, is the head of the new Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI), a joint task force charged with statewide responsibility for major crimes. In The Marble Mask, the VBI’s first case takes the force north to Stowe, where a fifty-year-old corpse has turned up in a crevasse on Mt. Mansfield.

    Some of the more interesting minor characters in author Archer Mayor’s long-running series about the amiable elder sleuth make return appearances here as Joe’s teammates—like one-armed Willy, a former wife-beater who’s now playing footsie with Sammie Martens, one of Joe’s favorite colleagues. When the frozen stiff turns out to have been a big-time Canadian crime boss named Jean Deschamps who disappeared after World War II, Joe and his gang cross the border to work with the Mounties, the Sûreté, and the local cops in Sherbrooke, where Deschamps’ son Marcel is involved in a turf war with the Hell’s Angels and a rival gang of thugs. Old secrets and intrigues come to light while an intricate plan to frame a dying man for a half-century-old crime forms an interesting puzzle that’s not fully revealed until the very end.

  • The body was positioned so that the train would neatly obliterate its head and hands. Dressed in a homeless man’s clothes with empty pockets, it might easily be passed off as an unfortunate John Doe. But Joe Gunther has a knack for knowing when things don’t quite add up, and the math in this case is all kinds of wrong. A toxic waste dumping scheme, a stabbing, and a whole lot of state politics quickly complicate matters further. If Occam’s razor were applied to Gunther’s caseload, how many incisions would it make?

  • Lt. Joe Gunther of the Brattleboro, Vermont, police force has a serious problem: in a community where a decade could pass without a single murder, the body count is suddenly mounting. Innocent citizens are being killed―and others set up―seemingly orchestrated by a mysterious ski-masked man.

    Signs suggest that a three-year-old murder trial might lie at the heart of things, but it’s a case that many in the department would prefer remained closed. A man of quiet integrity, Lt. Gunther knows that he must pursue the case to its conclusion, wherever it leads.

  • When a local quarry yields a garroted body with bad dental work and toes tattooed in Cyrillic, Joe Gunther figures it’s a Russian Mafia killing, rare as that might be in Vermont. But it’s so very … tidy. So very … professional. Then the CIA calls, inviting Gunther down to Washington for some friendly “assistance” with his case. Suddenly he’s caught up in a shadowy game of cross and double-cross—manipulated by cynical, cold warriors who don’t seem to have gotten the memo—and Gunther soon realizes that he’s a pawn both sides are willing to sacrifice.

  • Joe Gunther is sent to the neighboring town of Bellows Falls to investigate harassment allegations against a fellow officer. But as Gunther doggedly pursues the truth, what begins as a seemingly open-and-shut case starts to look more and more like a frame job, and he soon finds himself feeling around the edges of a statewide drug distribution network.

    As always, Vermont itself is a major character in Mayor’s writing, with Bellows Falls standing in for any number of slowly decaying, once-proud mill towns.

  • A forty-year-old skeleton is found encased in a concrete slab at a recently decommissioned nuclear energy site. It becomes a case for the Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI) and its leader, Joe Gunther, since they have the resources and the ability to investigate an old, very cold, missing persons case that has now been reclassified as murder. The victim was Hank Mitchell, and Gunther must chase down old rumors and speculations: Who benefited from his death and the disappearance of his body? And was his death somehow tied to New York City mafia money being laundered through the construction project?

    But what seems the coldest of cold cases roars back to life when one of the central figures in this mystery is shot to death, right after speaking with Gunther. And when a young police officer―the son of VBI investigator Lester Spinney―is kidnapped, is it meant to be a warning to the VBI team to drop the case?

    After all these many years, the truth behind the murder still has to the power to kill, and it’s up to Gunther and his team to capture the living and finally put the dead to rest.

  • A small girl brings Joe Gunther a bird’s nest—made partially of human hair. In the search to match a body—and an identity—to the hair’s owner, Joe comes across an unexplained death, a grisly murder, and a sudden disappearance. All seem to be entangled in a puzzling web of municipal corruption, blackmail, and industrial espionage. A shell-shocked World War II veteran nicknamed the Ragman may hold the key to it all—but only if Joe can get him to talk before the murderer strikes again.

  • A brutal home invasion shocks Brattleboro’s small Asian community, but no one is talking. Undeterred, Joe Gunther digs deeper and discovers a cross-border smuggling route carrying drugs, contraband, and illegal aliens into and out of Canada. Operating below the radar for years, competition between underworld rivals is bringing it into the light with deadly consequences.

    International jurisdiction is a complicated matter, and in the pursuit of justice, Gunther will have to collaborate with the FBI, the Border Patrol, and the Mounties.

  • When Gail Zigman, town selectwoman and Joe Gunther’s companion of many years, is raped, Gunther finds himself caught between the media, local politicians, and a network of well-meaning victims’ rights advocates as he tries to put his own feelings aside and follow a trail of evidence. Every lead points to a single, obvious suspect, but is the evidence too perfect?

    Risking his friendship with Gail, the respect of his peers, and his own life, Lieutenant Gunther keeps digging, hoping to find out if the man they have in jail is rightly there, or if the evidence against him is tainted—what police call “fruits of the poisonous tree.”

  • When a reclusive market gardener’s death proves to stem from a twenty-year-old bullet wound, Lieutenant Joe Gunther is presented with a very cold homicide to solve. But who was the victim exactly?

    A deeply private man eking out an ascetic existence from a hardscrabble mountain field, Abraham Fuller was virtually unknown to his neighbors, in the manner of someone pursuing more than mere solitude. The discovery of a bag full of unmarked bills and a body buried in the garden patch suggests that Fuller had motives beyond misanthropy. With someone willing to kill to ensure that old secrets remain buried, the case may not be so cold after all.

  • When the body of a fast-living young stockbroker is found in a shallow grave, suspicion first falls on a cuckolded policeman. Lieutenant Joe Gunther investigates the increasingly bizarre details of the crime, but he’s too far behind events to prevent a second murder. Indeed, whoever is responsible always seems to be a few steps ahead, as if there’s a leak in the police force. Sweltering August heat does nothing to calm the increasingly agitated town selectmen, who demand results.

  • Lieutenant Joe Gunther is in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom investigating a minor embezzling case. It’s a pleasant distraction and a chance to reconnect with old friends, but when a house fire reveals itself to be arson, compounded by murder, Gunther can’t help but investigate. He quickly finds himself enmeshed in a web of animosity between put-upon townspeople, the state police, angry parents, and members of a reclusive sect.

    Murder follows murder, yet no one seems to be telling Gunther the whole truth—not even his childhood friends. And truth is what he desperately needs if he’s to stop the killings.

  • During the height of a particularly brutal Vermont winter, a woman’s body is found one morning hanging high above the interstate. The woman, found with the word “dyke” carved on her chest, is quickly determined to be the victim of a brutal murder. That alone is enough to bring in Joe Gunther and his Vermont Bureau of Investigation team. But when the victim is identified not only as a state senator but as an intimate friend of the governor’s, it unleashes a publicity maelstrom that makes a difficult investigation even more challenging. While the anti-lesbian message is an obvious feint meant to mislead investigators, it does reveal that the governor is gay, and forces her to publicly acknowledge that fact.

    In the meantime, while the publicity rages on to even greater heights, the police begin to focus intensely on the dead senator’s life. One thing they uncover is that she had a fondness for recreational marijuana. In Vermont, however, neither lesbianism nor marijuana use justify murder. It’s up to Gunther and his team to find out not just who, but why?

  • An apparent accidental death turns out to be only the first of many murders.

    Ben Kendall was a troubled man. Coming back from Vietnam with PTSD and scars that no one else could see, he hid away from the world, filling his house with an ever-increasing amount of stuff, until finally the piles collapsed and he was found dead, crushed beneath his own belongings. But what on first glance looks to be the tragic accidental death of a hoarder may be something much more—and much deadlier. Ben's cousin, medical examiner Beverly Hillstrom, unsettled by the circumstances of his death, alerts Joe Gunther and his Vermont Bureau of Investigation team.

    Ben, it seems, brought back something from Vietnam other than just personal demons—he also brought back combat photos and negatives that someone else desperately wants to keep from the public eye. When Beverly's daughter Rachel made her cousin Ben—and his photos—the subject of her college art project, some of those photos appeared on the walls of a local art gallery. This resulted in the appearance of a two-man hit squad, searching for some other missing negatives.

    With Joe Gunther and his squad trailing behind the grisly research results of the hit team and the deadly killers closing in on Rachel, Gunther has little time to find and protect Rachel before she ends up in the same grisly state as her cousin.

  • Archer Mayor's New York Times bestselling Joe Gunther series returns with a complex case involving two corpses, one escaped mental patient, and a long-held secret that binds them together.

    "Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead."—Ben Franklin

    Joe Gunther and his team—the Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI)—are usually called in on major cases by local Vermont enforcement whenever they need expertise and backup. But after the state is devastated by Hurricane Irene, the police from one end of the state are taxed to their limits, leaving Joe Gunther involved in an odd, seemingly unrelated series of cases. In the wake of the hurricane, a seventeen-year-old gravesite is exposed, revealing a coffin that had been filled with rocks instead of the expected remains.

    At the same time, an old retired state politician turns up dead at his high-end nursing home, in circumstances that leave investigators unsure that he wasn't murdered. And a patient who calls herself the Governor has walked away from a state mental facility during the post-hurricane flood. It turns out she was indeed once "Governor for a Day," over forty years ago, and she might have also been falsely committed and drugged to keep her from revealing something she saw all those years ago. Amid the turmoil and the disaster relief, it's up to Joe Gunther and his team to learn what really happened with the two corpses—one missing—and what secret the Governor might have still locked in her brain that links them all.

  • Joe Gunther and his team at the Vermont Bureau of Investigation are alerted to a string of unrelated burglaries across Vermont. Someone, in addition to flats creens, computers, and stereos, has also been stealing antiques and jewelry. Meanwhile, in Boston, an elderly woman surprises some thieves in her Beacon Hill home and is viciously murdered. The Boston police find that not only is the loot similar to what's being stolen in Vermont, but it may have the same destination. Word is out that someone powerful is purchasing these particular kinds of items in the "Paradise City" of Northampton, Massachusetts.

    Gunther, the Boston Police, and the vengeful niece of the murdered old lady convene on Northampton, eager to get to the bottom of the mystery and find the "responsible parties"—although each is motivated to mete out some very different penalties.

  • Across Brattleboro, Vermont, rich people (some with dark secrets) are waking up in their high security, alarm-equipped homes to find a Post-It note stuck to their bedside tables reading, "You're it." There is little sign of disturbance anywhere, nothing stolen (that anyone admits) and only a bit of expensive food eaten as a signature. The press loves the story and dubs the burglar the Tag Man. But who is he? And what's he actually doing? In fact, he's quickly running for his life, for what he discovers in one of these houses appears to be proof of a heinous string of murders. But is it?

    Joe Gunther, struggling to recover from a devastating personal loss, leads his VBI team to untangle the many conflicting pieces of evidence, while the burglar himself struggles for survival in the no-man's land between the police and the villains. No one knows what to believe or who to trust. Tag Man is running for his life in a way he never imagined possible. No one knows who's watching as they sleep—or who truly did what.

    Tag Man is critically acclaimed author Archer Mayor at his very finest.

  • VBI (Vermont Bureau of Investigation) head Joe Gunther and his team are called in to investigate a series of violent deaths that appear unrelated until telltale clues reveal a linkage between them and that all of the deaths are, in fact, murders. However, apart from a single drop of unexplained blood left at each crime scene, there are no obvious connections between the victims or the cases. In the search for the elusive truth, the VBI must plumb the depths of every suspect's past, every victim's most intimate details, and examine each piece of evidence down to the smallest detail.

  • Wayne Castine was found brutally murdered and the murderer remains at large. A suspected child predator, he was killed in Brattleboro where he was involved with a tangled network of an extended family living in a local trailer park. Any member of the clan would have had the opportunity to kill him and, as he was involved with both the mother and her twelve-year-old daughter, reason to commit the murder. 

    At the same time, Joe Gunther has learned that his girlfriend Lyn Silva's fisherman father and brother, believed lost at sea off the coast of Maine, might have actually been murdered. Without enough solid information to warrant law enforcement involvement, Lyn returns to Maine to try and investigate Gunther's findings. Gunther periodically puts his ongoing murder investigation on hold—irritating his colleagues and angering his bosses—to go and help Lyn in Maine. It appears increasingly possible that her father and brother weren't the good guys that Lyn always believed them to be and that they might have been involved with vicious smugglers who murdered them—and might do the same to Lyn if she keeps pushing. Torn between his conscience and his heart, a murder investigation and a personal search for the truth, Gunther finds that betrayal and loyalty are often a matter of viewpoint.

  • Joe Gunther, a longtime Vermont cop and now the head of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation gets the call that every law enforcement person hates and every friend and family member of a policeman fears—a cop has been shot and killed. A deputy sheriff was shot to death during a routine traffic stop on a dark country road. From what can been seen on the cruiser’s tape recorder of the killers, it is believed that they were a couple of Boston-based drug runners who had been stopped by the deputy on their way from Canada down to Boston. 

    Which is what brings Gunther and his team to the investigation—an attempt to shut down the major drug running operation. Especially that of one Alan Budney, disaffected son of a lobsterman, now a drug kingpin, who uses the closed, clannish lobster fishing community and his extended family in particular, to move drugs along the New England coast.

  • In northwestern Vermont, young Bobby Cutts enters the family barn and encounters a nightmare. Surrounded by bolts of fire, Bobby and the entire herd perish in a stampeding, circle of flames. Called to the scene to investigate, Joe Gunther instantly recognizes arson. But by whom? And why? Gunther quickly discovers that someone is wreaking havoc across the bucolic farmlands surrounding the town of St. Albans. Somewhere in the dense social fabric of the community, in the hearts and souls of Bobby's family, and in the cutthroat farming business underneath the region's placid exterior are the truths his team must ferret out. But what looked like a local case is about to take them from the barns of Vermont to the gritty streets of Newark, New Jersey. Before all is said and done, Joe Gunther will meet one of his deadliest opponents to date … and he will need far more than his skills as a policeman to protect the people closest to his heart.