Into Thin Air by Thomas Zigal (review)

Reviews 111 dagger pointing at the sky.” Still, it’s good to remember the old river maxim when considering these relatively minor flaws: “There are two kinds of paddlers: those who have dumped and those who are going to.” Hookmen is a good ride. PETER ANDERSON Salt Lake City, Utah Into Thin Air. By Thomas Zigal. (New York: Delacorte Press, 1995. 259 pages, $19.95.) Set in that magical kingdom in the Rockies of Aspen, Colorado, Thomas Z igal’s Into Thin A ir is a pretty decent first mystery novel. Local boy Kurt Muller is an army veteran, ex-hippie, and nineties nice guy with a young son named Lennon (after John). Muller is also the Pitkin County sheriff, and glamour -gulch Aspen is the county seat. C hief deputy Muffin Brown jokes that Kurt is a confused victim of his hor­ mones: he’s a soft touch for women with sad tales. The sheriff’s also nearly blind to a myriad of minor vices as practiced by the Aspen rich. Muller isn ’t soft on murder, though. Visiting Argentine journalist and leftist good-guy Omar Quiroga is snuffed and his body dumped in the Roaring Fork River. Enter the FBI in the person of agent Neal Staggs. Bearded M uller and short-haired Staggs don’t get along. Staggs claim s M uller’s actually an Aspen drug kingpin; M uller swears that the Bureau has its dirty fingers into everything, i.e. Quiroga’s murder. Supporting characters include A spen’s greatest high school football star and Kurt’s one­ tim e friend, now shady m illionaire Jake Pfeil and gun-crazy, Hunter T hom pson-clone M iles Cunningham. Jake and M iles supply considerable color and texture to the tale. M uller’s w ife, M eg, a complex character in absentia, has suffered a m id-life crisis and is hiding in an Oregon commune trying to find herself. W ell-written physical descriptions of Aspen and Pitkin County, insightful fictional treatment of A spen’s growth and change since World War II, plus a large cast of self-absorbed characters are all strong points. Into Thin A ir has its problems: underdeveloped plot and underwritten action scenes. The book is not the page-turner it could have been— and proba­ bly should have been for its own good as a mystery novel. Delacorte Press notes that Zigal has a second Kurt M uller mystery in the offing. Sheriff Kurt Muller has shown that he has potential in this first outing. JAMES B. HEMESATH Colorado Springs, Colorado ...