PARIAH

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.