THE FIFTH SEASON is a superb and suspenseful literary thriller written by a forum member! (Me.) Just read the reviews...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0609606883/002-3369408-2869648?v=glance&n=283155&v=glance
"I want to say that THE FIFTH SEASON is by far the best detective novel set in New England that I've read since Robert B. Parker's early Spenser novels. But there's a big difference between the two. Don Bredes sets his Hector Bellevance novels among the wild green hills of northern Vermont, in the small town of Tipton, hard by the Canadian border. Bredes's COLD COMFORT (2001) was the first book in what is shaping up to be a really fine series.
Hector Bellevance is Tipton's compassionate and reluctant town constable. He's also an ex-Boston PD homicide detective and Crimson hoops star who, after some serious reversals in the big bad city, has left the force and returned to his tranquil Vermont birthplace to grow vegetables for the local farmer's market.
This story begins on a Sunday at the height of mud season in April, the first morning in the previous 63 that it hasn't been snowing or raining. It's also Hector's 41st birthday, and as he walks around his farm in the early light opening his coldframes full of seedlings to the sun's rays, he feels completely content with his wholesome life. That doesn't last long. At noon, checking his messages, he learns that the town clerk wants him to serve a relief-from-abuse order on the crusty old town road foreman, Marcel Boisvert, a childhood friend of Hector's father. And Hector's girlfriend, Wilma, the number-one reporter for the local newspapaer, wants him to meet her in the high woods near the border, where the county sheriff has just found a headless, handless body. The sunny day, needless to say, quickly becomes a stressful and troubling one.
Then, early the next morning, Hector finds the sheriff and the town clerk shot dead, and the road foreman has disappeared..."