In Aspen, everyone wants a
piece of the mountain: the
bitter, dust-covered miners, the tycoons
who own the slopes, and the radical environmentalists who want both
miners and skiers off the land. Caught in the middle is
Kurt Muller, an Aspen native who went from hippie to sheriff., boy to
man, and innocence to loss while his small Rocky Mountain hometown
turned into a playground for the rich. Now Muller is
investigating the murder of a cantankerous old miner and longtime
family friend, Ned Carr, dynamited to death in his own worthless
mine.
While Muller's first suspect is his beautiful
high school crush, a wounded woman whose past includes radical activism
and TNT, she is not his last: somevery powerful people have ties to Ned
Carr's doomed whole in the ground. With a folk music star turned
corporate wife, a violent antienvironmental coalition, and a mysterious
Ute Indian all drawn into the case, Muller's search erupts into a mad
brawl of money, greed, and passion - while a secret worth killing for
lies buried like dynamite in a shaft . . .
Praise
for HARDROCK STIFF
"EXPLOSIVE
ACTION... PLENTY OF THRILLS... A FINE WHODUNNIT."
- Chicago Tribune
"INTO THIN AIR, ZIGAL'S FIRST BOOK ABOUT KURT MULLER, WAS GOOD; HIS
SECOND TAKES A QUANTUM LEAP UP TO TERRIFIC. Muller is a
complex, believable character . . . . Throughout this strong, sad,
constantly involving story, Zigal renders the deep bond between people
and the land with a blend of complexity and conflict that enriches the
genre."
-Publishers Weekly (starred Review)
"Zigal
continues to paint a multidimensional protrait of the trendy
Rocky Mountain resort [of Aspen] and its permanent residents . . . and
Muller stands out as a compelling new centurion."
-Chicago Tribune
"[ZIGAL] USES A FINE EYE FOR DETAIL TO WRITE BEAUTIFULLY OF
AN AREA WHERE HE ONCE LIVED, AND OF A LANDSCAPE OF THE HEART."
-The Times Picayune (New Orleans)
"What the mystery does best of all - at its very heart - is retrieve
personal history, uncovering all the folded lies. No one knows
this better than Thomas Zigal. He drags the sixties we smugly think we
know so well into the nineties we can't figure out at all, forcing us
again and again to wonder which it is that's become distorted. Zigal is
a fine writer."
-James Sallis, author of Black Hornet
"ONE OF THE YEAR'S HAPPIEST SURPRISES . . . Muller, a cop with a
rare talent for pointed meditation, unearths many well-planted
surprises."
- Kirkus Reviews
"THIS ONE HAS EVERYTHING MYSTERY FANS WANT . . . A FASCINATING BEAT
FOR AN ENGAGING COP."
- Booklist
"A Deftly plotted mystery . . . intricate and ingenious . . .Zigal
tells a provocative and compelling story."
- Dallas Morning News
"Terrific . . . as gripping as the many action scenes are, what really
lifts this novel to excellence is the way Zigal writes about fathers
and children."
- Publishers Weekly
"Thomas Zigal's is a terrically strong and wonderfully humane new voice
in crime fiction."
- James Crumley
All information on this page was borrowed
from my own copy of HARDROCK STIFF
published by Dell Publishing, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc
HARDROCK STIFF
Copyright 1996 by Thomas Zigal
ISBN: 0-440-22452-7