Easy Pickin's

Depression-era Oklahoma sheriff Okie Dunn is faced with a corpse dropped from an airplane and a mysterious young heiress to an oil fortune in this somewhat predictable case, his second following 1999's well-received Coyote Revenge. Temporarily suspended from law school after punching out a professor, Okie Dunn is sheriff in Vernon, Okla., where most of the crimes are minor and don't call for much investigation from the young sheriff or his two chief deputies, Stud Wampler and Crystal Boucher. Then bounty hunter Tobe Satville appears in Vernon, hunting for a young woman born there on Easter Sunday in 1919Dbut Tobe refuses to say why he's looking for her. Next on the scene is Em (short for Emma) Hoffer, a lawyer, claiming she's searching for the same young woman on behalf of her birth mother. Eventually, Hoffer confides that whoever the girl is, she is half-heiress to an oil fortune. Then a third person comes to town, looking for the same girl. He identifies himself as John Carter, but Okie discovers that he has another name. Before long, Okie and Em Hoffer have to fly to Mexico to rescue a kidnapped oil heiress and sort out the identity of the killer who dropped the body out of a plane. Harris, a former U.S. senator, creates likable characters and brings the setting and the era alive with down-home details, but the novel's leisurely pace will have most readers wishing for fewer details and more suspense. This series still should do well with fans of traditional historicals, especially in the Southwest. Agent, Elaine Markson. (Nov.)