Sheriff Kurt Muller, aging hippie, single father, and son of one of Aspen’s founders, finds himself confronted by more than the usual tensions between the chic international celebrity jet set and the local community fighting the resort’s enormous growth. A man is dead, his washed-out body found in the Roaring Fork with a bullet hole behind one ear. A woman is missing, her handbag still hidden under Kurt Muller’s Jeep seat. And the violence that is erupting around Aspen—violence laced with kinky sex, international politics, and local power—is leading Muller to the darkest truths a man can about his past, about his family, and about another murder in the high Rocky Mountain air…

Ned Carr is a miner, an irascible old coot who has held on to acres of prime real estate in the middle of Aspen’s ski slopes. Carr feuds with everyone, including the ski company and eco-warriors who want to shut down his mines. Sheriff Kurt Muller is the only person with a soft spot for Carr. Following up a suspicious call, Muller rushes to Carr’s mine—in time to witness the shaft explosion that kills him. Drawn into a dangerous covert war between militant greens and corporate forces grappling for control of the New West, Muller uncovers a conspiracy that could destroy his most cherished loves—the two children under his protection and the snowcapped wilderness he calls home.

In Aspen, ex-hippies drive Volvos, ski bums cut million-dollar deals, and Sheriff Kurt Muller is the a single father with a checkered past and the notion that right and wrong still matter. But one evening, against his better judgment, Muller spends the night comforting an old flame, a reclusive heiress named Nicole Bauer who’s convinced her ex-lover, the 60s blues idol Rocky Rhodes, is threatening to kill her. Kurt doesn’t believe her story, for good twenty years earlier, Rocky’s body was found on the grounds of the Bauer mansion, and Nicole was charged with his murder. But the next morning, Nicole is found dead, and Kurt is a prime suspect…