Aspen, Colorado – a silver mining camp turned luxury ski resort. Once home to Hunter S Thompson, John Denver and some discreet druggies. The full-time population is not much more than 7,000, but that gets super swelled in ski season. What a great recipe for crime!
Chuck Morgan’s Crime Delayed (2018) has all the luxurious ski resorts and celebrity sightings you could need. When a wildlife ranger goes missing, Colorado Bureau of Investigation Agent Buck Taylor is called in to assist with the search which uncovers the mummified bodies of 15 young women, all killed by the same person decades ago. Aspen’s citizens promptly go into panic mode and Taylor needs to get to the bottom of this. The Buck Taylor series – 20 books in all – bounces around Colorado from Durango to Rio Blanco County. A few, as well as Crime Delayed, focus on Aspen. Crime Denied (2020) sends Taylor back to the snow-capped mountains and luxurious ski resorts where a female killer is luring victims using her charm and beauty to lure unsuspecting victims into her traps. And Crime Scene (2023) sees Taylor and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation chasing a club killer through the streets of Aspen.
Catherine O’Connell specialises in crime books with snow and skiing in them. O’Connell’s latest book, The Ski Resort (2025) is not clearly identified as Aspen but might as well be. Ski patroller Greta Westerlind wakes in hospital having almost been killed in an avalanche, she is devastated to learn that her close friend, bond trader Warren McGovern, perished in the slide. With no memory of the incident, Greta is at a loss to explain why the two of them were skiing in such lethal terrain in the first place and why a young woman they supposedly encountered is now missing.
The Dead Girl in 2A (2019) by Carter Wilson starts with two strangers meeting on a plane. Jack Buchannan thinks he knows the woman sitting next to him on his business flight to Denver―he just can’t figure out how he knows her. Clara Stowe admits she’s traveling to the Colorado mountains to kill herself, and she disappears into the crowded airport immediately after landing. A psychological thriller of the whom-can-you-trust paranoia genre that is a good example of the sub-genre and has some Colorado mountains in it.
And a few more Aspen and Colorado-set crime novels….
Antler Dust (2007) by Mark Stevens is set in Colorado’s Flattop Mountains and features a female hunting guide, a “reformed” hunter, an earnest ranger and a greedy outfitter. Two deaths occur within a few minutes of each other on a snowy day at the outset of elk hunting season with witnesses seeing hunters dragging corpses – humans, elks? – up mountains. Hunters are shooting eco-protestors too. Stevens is a Colorado resident and former Denver Post reporter and producer for the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour.
Patrick Hasburgh’s Aspen Pulp (2007) is set in off-season Aspen with former TV writer turner private eye Jake Wheeler hired to find the rather feckless Tinker Mellon. Using what little he’s learned from The Rockford Files and other TV detective shows, Jake’s search for the cheerleader-turned-runaway uncovers a complex crime ring that lies deep within the old mine shafts of Aspen mountain.
Anne Shillolo’s Murder at Aspen Creek (2023) finds off-duty Inspector Hilary Casgrain looking forward to a Cowboy Poetry Festival (sounds like fun!), but dragged into a drive-by shooting and the search for a missing teenager.
Killjoy (2002) by Julie Garwood introduces FBI profiler Avery Delaney finds that her workaholic aunt Carolyn, trying to relax at the posh Utopia Spa in the Colorado mountains, has vanished mysteriously before even reaching the spa.
Taylor Adams’ No Exit (2017) takes us up into the Colorado Mountains where college student Darby Thorne is stranded by a blizzard at a highway rest stop. There she stumbles across a little girl locked inside one of their parked cars. With no cell phone reception, no telephone, no way out because of the snow, and she has no idea which one of the other travelers is the kidnapper.
Vibe change! – Aspen has attracted a lot of cozy crime writers it seems. Gail Roper writes the Mysteries of Aspen Falls series. In Tell Tail Clues (2022) Ohio native Dr. Ashley Hart, is the new veterinarian in Aspen Falls with best friend dog groomer Holly Kipp. And so a vet and a dog groomer solve crimes with animal-related clues piling up all over town. Other titles include Dogged Deception, Foal Me Once, Bones to Pick, Hounded by the Past, Paw and Order – you get the idea.
There’s also a few in the crime/romance hybrid. For instance Christmas Crime in Colorado (2008) by Cassie Miles where Brooke Johnson is spending a quiet festive season in her new Colorado home before her look-alike roommate is killed and sexy police detective Michael Shaw shows up. She falls, literally, into the long arms of the law, but Michael can’t let down his guard with a killer still on the loose.
And finally, something special and highly recommended – Ryan La Sala, the wildly popular author of Reverie, followed that hit up with The Honeys (2022), a kind of horror, crime melange set in and around Aspen. Mars has always been the lesser twin, the shadow to his sister Caroline’s radiance. But when Caroline dies under horrific circumstances, Mars is propelled to learn all he can about his once-inseparable sister who’d grown tragically distant. And so he attends the prestigious Aspen Conservancy Summer Academy where his sister spent so much of her time. But the longer he stays at Aspen, the more the sweet mountain breezes give way to hints of decay. It’s a super-contemporary novel where supposedly idyllic locales butt up against tradition and intransigence.
Aspen may be chock full of luxury hotels, resorts and spas, but there’s some serious nature out there too. Put the two together, along with humans and all their petty jealousies, foibles and weirdness and you’ve got a great setting for the crime writers of Colorado.
