ASPEN INCIDENT

Joe Bird lost a shot at an Olympic skiing medal when he took a spill on a French slope and hit a tree. Now he runs Joe's Place, a cozy bar in Aspen, Colorado, where the good old guys hang out. One night Joe is surprised to see his old teenage flame Martha walk in with her husband of many years, the charismatic Senator Blake Ross, a very likely candidate for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Next morning, as Joe and Ross are going up a ski-lift, the Senator is shot to death by a silenced rifle. Joe hears the man's last words, a warning to his wife to watch out for a certain man she thinks is her great friend. Is the murder politically motivated, an assassination? Joe keeps the last words to himself and Martha, but soon someone lobs a lethally intended, heavy arrow into his Porsche. Then a man posing as a federal investigator tries to run him off a mountain road. Then a friend is nearly killed when Joe's Porsche is rigged with a bomb. At the climax, Joe has a leg broken by the killers, but eventually makes his way down a slope where he's been left to freeze--and he does it on a toboggan. A thin tale, heavily padded, with an unconvincing unknotting, but the Aspen background has its pungence.