Angel of Fire

Douglass's ( Wish Me a Rainbow ) romance holds great possibilities but falls back on a standard plot of delayed fulfillment. Outlaw Cole Varney and his band of eight appear at Victoria Lansford's family farm in Kansas, where they kill her father and rape her sister, Lisbeth, who is reduced to an infantile state. Bent on revenge, Victoria teams up with the farm's kindly handyman, Eli Burkett, and disguises herself as a male bounty hunter named Vic Langley. A broken leg puts Burkett out of commission, but Lansford continues her quest in the company of his old friend Noah Killian, a Civil War hero who was later found guilty on trumped-up charges of having deserted his patrol, and who believes that Varney's boss may be the man who sabotaged him. But Douglass sets up an improbable first meeting between Killian and Lansford. Lansford, who has taken a bath and put her clothes out for washing, has forgotten to bring fresh clothes with her and is forced to walk through a barroom in the only clothing at hand: a sexy red dress. Killian is entranced by the woman in red, whom he takes for a prostitute, but later he fails to connect her with the young man riding with him. (Jan.)