Business at the Rock of Ages is as dead as the fossils cluttering the shop’s dusty shelves. Morgan Iverson, recently widowed and jobless, expects managing the family rock shop for two weeks will be more vacation than work. When she arrives in Colorado, her brother slaps the keys in her hand and announces he’s never coming back.
Her first day in charge, two pet donkeys escape. While rounding them up on a snowy mountain trail, Morgan discovers the body of a Goth teen. After the newspaper splashes the front page with more sensation than truth, Morgan becomes the victim of an escalating series of near misses. She suspects the killer wants to eliminate the only witness to the crime. The problem is, she didn’t see anything.
As Morgan struggles to save the Rock of Ages–and herself–from extinction, a handsome shop owner pursues her. He seems more eager to get his hands on her property than on her middle-aged body. Selling the rock shop would toss a homeless old cowboy out into the winter cold, and send the escape-artist donkeys to the glue factory.
New friends convince Morgan to join a running club, but racing on remote trails exposes her to more danger. Unless she can dig up the identity of the murderer, Morgan’s life won’t be worth a pile of fossilized dinosaur dung.
Stone Cold Dead is an amateur sleuth mystery set in a mountain tourist town populated with lively Western characters and two determined donkeys.