Delilah

Exactly what sort of hero Logan (Night Fire) wanted the reader to find in this hopelessly overwritten historical romance, set in the Northwest Territories in the late 1800s, isn't clear. Simon Oakes is a Canadian Mountie on leave to track down his brother's murderer. Although his many masculine attributes are glowingly, even annoyingly repeated, Delilah Smith isn't impressed by the man she refers to as a ``petunia,''--a man who cooks gourmet dishes, swaps recipes, wears embroidered suspenders and crochets to work off his frustrations. Delilah is a moody piece of work herself. She blames her ill fortune on her mother (also named Delilah) and feels she is paying for her mother's sins. Her goal is to find her younger brother, who left more than a decade before to find and retrieve their hidden fortune. She and Simon team up when he comes to believe that Delilah's brother and his own brother's murderer are one and the same person. The plot thickens, but not enough to glue the story together. The most noticeable of its many problems is the romance lingo, applied like big gobs of cold cream (``The tears were trailing down her cheeks now, silvery trails glistening and slipping to her chest like tiny diamonds threaded onto a silken thread''). (Mar.)