Stephen Singular & Joyce Singular's "Shadow on the Mountain"

Stephen Singular is a New York Times bestselling author and Edgar Award nominee. His book Talked to Death was made into the Oliver Stone film Talk Radio. Joyce Singular is an author of two books and a collaborator on a number of titles with her husband, adding a female perspective on the nature of crime.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Shadow on the Mountain: Nancy Pfister, Dr. William Styler, and the Murder of Aspen's Golden Girl, and reported the following:

The page 99 test works well for this book -- the story of an Aspen heiress, Nancy Pfister, who once dated Michael Douglas and then Jack Nicholson. She was a regular at Hunter Thompson’s kitchen table when the King of Gonzo was ruling Woody Creek, just outside of Aspen, from the 1970s into the new millennium. She could hold her own after midnight, when partying with any of them, and combined both charm and a nasty, entitled tongue that some people dealt with better than others. In time, because of her drinking, drugging, and sexual escapades, she began to fall down Aspen’s social ladder. Although her family was quite wealthy, she was also on a limited budget and always in need of more money. In the fall of 2013, she planned to go away to Australia for the winter and needed to rent out her house. Dr. William Styler III, a once prominent Denver anesthesiologist, and his wife, Nancy, had lately fallen on very hard times. Looking to reinvent themselves in Aspen in their sixties, they met Nancy Pfister and this seemed to be a perfect solution for all – until Pfister starting treating them less like tenants and more like servants. Trouble came almost as soon as she left for Down Under because she didn’t feel that she’d been paid what the Stylers owed. Enter Pfister’s personal assistant/bank teller/one-time lover Kathy Carpenter, the intermediary between the couple and their landlady while she was out of the country. Six thousand dollars that the Stylers had paid to Pfister mysteriously disappeared and ended up in Carpenter’s possession.

Page 99 describes the escalating conflict between Pfister, who didn’t know what had become of the $6,000, and the Stylers, who felt wrongly accused of being in her debt. She’s about to return from Australia, throw them out of her house, and all hell will soon break loose. Within a few days, Carpenter will find Pfister dead in her bedroom closet and the Stylers (and then Carpenter herself) will be arrested for murder. Which one of the three people or what combination of the three did it? The case was resolved four months later, but many people believe the truth has still not come out… An apparently simple story that’s surrounded on every side by ambiguity.

Visit Stephen Singular's website.

--Marshal Zeringue