THE MAIL ORDER GROOM

Cursed with irresistible beauty—irresistible, at least, to the female-starved, gold-mining men of the 19th-century town of Silver Wind, Colo.—schoolteacher Melissa Grayson is forced by outraged citizens to choose between being jailed, run out of town or married. So she sends for a mail-order husband, a frail intellectual with whom she's corresponded but never met. Within minutes of his arrival, she marries him. Problem solved. Except that Melissa's new spouse is not pen-pal James Harold Pickney IV but roving gambler and rescuer-of-damsels-in-distress Lucky Lawrence, who's fleeing from a Mexican evildoer named Cerqueda. A cowboy comedy of errors ensues as Lucky shakes up the town and Melissa's life. Chastain's (The Outlaw Bride) straightforward writing style drifts from simple to simplistic more than once. There are interminable rehashings of the plot every time a new character shows up, for instance, and Cerqueda is virtually a south-of-the-border cartoon. Still, the exuberance of Chastain's writing matches the wild west setting perfectly; it's easy to imagine this book adapted as an "Oklahoma!"-type musical comedy—albeit with considerably more premarital sex than is usually found on Broadway (or in the average romance novel). (July 2)