The Marble Mask

A frozen body is found on top of Vermont's tallest mountain in the middle of winter. Lost hiker or foul play? Hard to tell until the marble-hard body is thawed out. A hand and a foot have been broken off, as if from a great fall, and the body's clothing looks oddly old-fashioned. An autopsy reveals an ice-pick wound to the heart, a Canadian driver's license dating back to just after World War Two, and the fact that the body's been dead and frozen for over fifty years. The corpse is that of Jean Deschamps, an old-time smuggler from Sherbrooke, Quebec, who made a fortune during the war as an industrialist. His son Michel has run the crime-family business since his father's disappearance. Both Hell's Angels and the Montreal-based Rock Machine are interested in taking over the Deschamps turf. Was the evidence suggesting that Michel killed his own father planted by those two factions? Indications are that Jean believed his older son, Antoine, had been murdered in the Italian campaign during the war, and not killed in combat as reported. And there are rumors a priceless marble mask by Michelangelo also vanished around the same time, never to be seen again, and that one of Antoine's fellow combatants is now a wealthy recluse in Stowe. Joe and his new Vermont Bureau of Investigation team, including Sam and Willy, set out to solve these riddles amid an increasingly dangerous political landscape involving cops and crooks on both sides of the border.

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