Wicked Web 

For loyal Archer Mayor readers, anticipation runs high this time of year. That's because the Newfane novelist churns out another Joe Gunther mystery each fall, almost like clockwork. When a new one arrives in stores, you know it signals the end of daylight savings time, the beginning of longer, colder nights and . . . hunting season. A perfect time, in other words, to settle in with a good book.

Mayor's latest, called simply Chat, is his 18th. That alone is an impressive achievement, and perhaps especially so for a series that subsists with essentially the same characters: Gunther, the Brattleboro-based head of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation, and his colorful coterie of detectives. Over the years, of course, Mayor has led this crew through significant changes - most notably the establishment of the VBI, several volumes ago; and the gradual dissolution of Joe's longtime relationship with Gail, who's now a legislator in Montpelier. Assessing the author's last installment, The Second Mouse, some critics judged the franchise to be a little tired. Whether or not Mayor himself thought so, he certainly worked up a new head of steam with Chat.

For starters, as the book's title hints, Chat takes on an au courant kind of crime: the online stalking of underage girls. There's nothing new about pedophiles, of course, but Mayor's introduction of the Internet into the arsenal of Vermont's seedier elements is realistically contemporary, and it's a believable device for turning - as he always has - the state's bucolic reputation upside down. In fact, the anonymous, ubiquitous phenomenon of the chat room makes its denizens, in some ways, far creepier foes than your average flesh-and-blood murderer.

Speaking of which, there are indeed dead bodies - one man found in a river, another face down on a motel bed - and the mystery is not just whodunit, but how. Naturally, that cannot be revealed here, but suffice it to say that no actual sex crime occurs in Chat: The unlucky would-be perps meet their demise instead.

But these are not the only mysteries in the novel - nor, despite the title, even the most important ones. A far more compelling drama begins with a serious car crash involving Gunther's mother and brother. Actually, it begins as they leave a movie at Dartmouth College on a cold winter night and head across the river to their home in Vermont. Previously only background figures in the series, these two characters take center stage in Chat. Joe's wheelchair-bound mother proves to be a bright, insightful and engaging elderly woman, while his brother Leo, a butcher by trade and mechanic by avocation, is a never-married serial dater who appears to prefer living, and hanging out, with his mom.

The development of these characters, and Joe's relationship with them, adds emotional depth to the book, while his relatives' near death on the road generates its other mystery. At the hospital, Joe finds Leo hooked up to tubes and monitoring machines, barely conscious. But he ignites Joe's investigation of the crash with one economical line.

Leo closed his eyes, and Joe realized he was fighting back tears.

As he and his associates solve these enigmas - two dead men with no IDs on one side, the apparent attempted murder of his mother and brother on the other - Gunther unravels several layers of family history. How the lives of Mrs. Gunther and her two sons intersect with those of local heavy E.T. Griffis and his two unfortunate offspring is the central, and most complex, intrigue in the book.

That's not to say the romantic subplot isn't compelling. Mayor has always done a commendable job of balancing Joe Gunther's private and professional lives. In Chat, old girlfriend Gail re-emerges to provide support at the hospital - she's been close to Joe's mother - and the author uses her as a device to complicate his hero's emotional state. But as Joe wrestles with his uncomfortable status as a lonely middle-aged man, Woman Number Two reappears from the past. Lyn Silva was a bit player in an earlier book, an attractive barkeep who helped with an investigation and stirred Joe's imagination just as his relationship with Gail was beginning to fray. This time, Lyn enters the picture when Joe is ostensibly "available." She's a dynamic new character for the series, and a provocateur of Joe's typical mental gyrations.

He studied the back of their guest as if she might suddenly pull a gun. He kept retrieving fragments of the one time they'd met, and coming up with only good memories. She was a single mother of a then twenty-year-old girl, a bookkeeper by day and a bartender at night, and at the time, at least, she'd been genuine, smart, sexy, and remarkably appealing - just as she appeared today.

Joe and Lyn's cautious, tentative steps toward each other put Mayor on solid ground - he's a pro at exploring the thoughts, feelings, insecurities and, yes, maturity of mid-life romance. And that dash of sweetness is welcome in a book that otherwise deals in troubled, menacing and downright despicable humans.

Mayor excels, too, in drawing on geography and history. He has always been thoughtfully observant not only of locale but of its big-picture context, and he continues this tradition in Chat:

This section of the Connecticut River Valley was absurdly pretty, slicing between New Hampshire and Vermont, and decorated with covered bridges, backwater bays, and cow-sprinkled farms. The background of ancient mountains behind the massive, undulating, dark river told a tale of humanity's struggle with nature, since both these weather-beaten New England states had eschewed their peaks for the water's edge and turned the river into a commercial highway for over two hundred years, luring pioneers, aboriginal and white, who had forged far inland and upstream for reasons benign and not.

When it comes to the cyber-landscape, though, Mayor isn't as confident. His device for incorporating the Internet into Chat is awkward at best. Rather than allowing specific characters to experience the chat room - to post or respond to messages; to feel, think, and act accordingly - he simply interjects sample exchanges between chapters:

Lonely: any hot girl wanna chat?

Hottie: yea

Shez: add me

Dislove: dude

Gangsta: ron how tall r u?

Shez: n u can hav a look

Hottie: what is it

Lonely: any hot girl wanna chat?

Hottie: kk

Dislove: bored

Hottie: so u gonna talk me something about yourself