Pariah

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Aspen, Colo., sheriff Kurt Muller (Hardrock Stiff) becomes personally involved in a murder case in this crisply methodical outing. While attending a charity auction in order to polish his reputation in the face of a recall vote that could yank him from office, the impulsive Kurt is lured away to spend a sensual night with his former lover, reclusive heiress Nicole Bauer. Beautiful and lonely, Nicole is notorious for beating a homicide rap more than 20 years earlier, after legendary rock star Rocky Rhodes plunged to his death from her balcony. But now Nicole tells Kurt that she has been receiving threatening letters from someone she believes to be Rocky. Kurt leaves Nicole's house in the middle of the night; the next morning, she is found dead below her house--just like Rocky was. Kurt, suspecting murder, launches an intense investigation reaching back to the 1970s, when he, like Rocky's gang, eagerly partook of sex, drugs and rock and roll. As more members of the singer's former entourage are murdered, the sheriff probes deeper into their history and discovers surprising connections between them and Aspen's moneyed upper class. Such information is dangerous, and Kurt's reckless, confrontational personality soon imperils his life--and that all-important election. Zigal's twisting plot loops around a cadre of intriguing villains. Against the background of Aspen's natural beauty, he creates a chilling tale, though one leavened with wry humor. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

When an old flame approaches Aspen Sheriff Kurt Muller about some threatening letters, he senses her fearful insecurity--not to mention her proximity to a potentially lethal combination of drugs, alcohol, and an overhanging balcony. Acquitted of killing her abusive blues-star husband years earlier, Nicole Bauer now believes that the "dead" husband has returned for revenge. Sure enough, Nicole dies soon after "talking" with Kurt, who immediately becomes the center of conjecture--and the object of a murderer's interest. This third Kurt Muller mystery is a riveting story of passion, horror, and misguided allegiance. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A year after his imprudently sexual comforting of Nicole Bauer following a break-in by one of her late husband Rocky Rhodes's off-kilter groupies, Sheriff Kurt Muller is back in Nicole's arms again, this time not by choice. Her guitarist husband can't have plummeted from their deck to the hills below in the middle of battering her, Nicole insists; he's alive and threatening her with letters filled with personal details nobody else would know. Does the fact that Rocky's corpse was stolen from the mortuary, allegedly by members of his band, mean that somebody else died in his place? Could Mariah Windstar, the groupie who may have witnessed Rocky's fatal plunge, set the record straight? Before Kurt, battling a recall motion launched by a county commissioner determined to build his career on Kurt's bones to reopen the case, has a moment to do so, Nicole has died the same way Rocky did, and Kurt seems to have inherited her tormenter. The fragrant can of worms he'll be opening leads him to sex tapes, marital betrayal, and a classic Colorado land scam, though Zigal's third (Hardrock Stiff, 1996, etc.) is too busy limning the extent of the characters' black chicanery to make much of a mystery about who's done just what to whom, and one perp is a particularly unfair surprise. As usual in Zigal, then, the question of whodunit takes a back seat to Kurt's pained, frantic examination of Nicole's sorry past, refracted through the prism of his own.