Archer Mayor's long-running Vermont-based series is a comfort read for me. It's fun to meet the same characters every year. The author does an exceptional job of depicting work relationships guided by a boss who (contrary to crime fiction cliche) is a good guy who cares about his team and has a lot of common sense. returnreturnIn this outing, we are thrust into an upside-down manor house mystery, the kind where wealthy folks living in luxury begin to be picked off. But in this case, the patriarch is a mobbed up crook who forces people to live in his converted mill under his control, even though they almost all hate one another. It's a real nest of vipers. As the police investigate the suddenly suspicious death of the patriarch (only discovered long after his death, when a medical student dissects his body and finds a crushed hyoid bone, indicative of strangulation instead of natural causes), two low-level mobsters from Rhode Island are conducting their own parallel investigation, with neither group aware of the other. returnreturnI struggled to sort out the characters - there are many, and their relationships are tangled - and wished there was a character list. A family tree would be even more helpful, though it might contain spoilers. Toward the end I finally had them straightened out, but the first half was quite a challenge. The ending is quite abrupt, but leaves readers with a morally interesting and unexpected last-minute twist.