Bank robbers run a roadblock, killing the sheriff of a high country county and severely wounding a deputy, the disappear into the mountain snow. What begins in mid-January as a straightforward search for two crooks by lat May becomes a tangle of people and motives as former sheriff turned ocnsultant to the staste Bureau of Investigation C. W. Blakenship unrevels a snarl of embezzlement, drugs and murder that climaxes with a forest fire and a dynamite-laden confrontation.

Robert J. Rosenbaum lives in the San Juan Mountains where he divides his time between the Arrowhead VFD, heaching history at hte Montrose campus of Mesa State College and writing novels set in a fictionalized version of Colorado's Western Slope.