Bank rob bers 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.