Missing at Tenoclock

Tenoclock is a sleepy Colorado tourist town where Johnnie Baker always closes the police station at 11:00 p.m.--until one night Johnnie's routine is shattered by a jail brawl, a missing persons report, and a lot of "facts" that do not add up

Tenoclock, Colo., once a frontier town, is now touted as the "new Vail," offering tourists skiing, staged gunfights in the streets and shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue. The fantasy is disturbed when the body of Sheriff Jim Way is sawed in two by the narrow-gauge railway train on the same night that a father and his runaway teenaged daughter disappear. Johnelle "Johnnie" Baker, Way's deputy and a failed starlet, is named acting sheriff by the county boosters, who block her investigation and howl angrily when she names former sheriff Butt Peabody as her deputy. Another teenaged girl goes missing, while Johnnie, after tracing the mud on the tires of Way's Bronco to an abandoned mine where she makes a gruesome discovery, is trapped in a maze of underground tunnels. As she tries to survive and find a way out, Butt tracks the missing persons, who, like the sheriff, were last seen alive at the secluded Sky Estates mansion of an over-the-hill actor and his menacing bodyguard. Danger, suspense and romance come together in this action-filled mystery by the author, as John Miles, of Murder in Retirement.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Williams, a pseudonym for John Miles (A Permanent Retirement, 1992, etc.), tells a tale of Tenoclock, which has been named Colorado's newest tourist-celebrity boomtown but where, still, Deputy Sheriff Jonelle (Johnnie) Baker can usually close the police station before midnight. Then the Sheriff is hit by a train. Was he simply drunk, or was there some foul play involved? Johnnie thinks the Sheriff's death is tied to a missing-persons case, and now witnesses are disappearing. Clues point to the exclusive Sky Estates and the famous, reclusive movie star Brandon Warner. Johnnie finds two bodies in an abandoned mine, but the exit has been booby-trapped and she plunges into the lower levels with little hope for escape or rescue. The resourceful Acting Sheriff finds a way out, only to be confronted by another life-and-death situation, along with a mayor and county commissioner who will do almost anything to avoid bad publicity. For all of its glamorous visitors and vivid townsfolk, this trip to Tenoclock is more skillful than exciting. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.