I thought this was an excellent story, but what I like more than Mayor's plots are the character development. We get to know the police in his town of Brattleboro as individuals, with their quirks and preferences and attitudes and specialties. This time Mayor expanded a bit to Montpelior and the state legislature. Maybe we'll learn more about them too ( )

Those who prefer the more slam-bam action-filled books, will probably not like this title. A side plot involves Vermont police politics as one senator wants to combine all the police agencies in the state under one umbrella, and Joe is asked to testify to its merits. This little side-show has only a peripheral connection to the investigation into the killing of a man whose body was laid on railroad tracks to obliterate hands and head, making identification much more difficult. One of the witnesses happened to be the new boyfriend of Sammy, Gunther's sergeant, another side-plot some readers might find extraneous. The peripheral details did not bother me as they add a note of verisimilitude to the story which is, after all, a police procedural.

The investigation itself soon involves illegal dumping of hazardous waste, drugs, and prostitution and another killing. (Mayor manages to get his digs in: "The truck Marshall Smith had introduced me to was a case in point. By making waste disposal such a complicated, expensive, strictly licensed enterprise, our vigilant environmentalists had inadvertently created a booming black market in illegal dumping." )

Some nice lines: "“That you?” Her voice took me back to my first viewing of The Wizard of Oz and the Wicked Witch of the West. She certainly seemed to have the same aversion to water." ( )