Missing at Tenoclock

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. (June)