Winter Fire

Bestselling paperback romance novelist Lowell (Autumn Lover) makes her first foray into hardcover with this smoothly written post-Civil War western romance. Shortly after the death of her parents in a flood, 14-year-old Sarah Kennedy, now responsible for herself and her younger brother, Conner, becomes a mail-order bride, marrying a brutal older man who drinks and demands painful sex. Widowed two years later, she strives to maintain her farm in the Utah wilderness, where she lives with Conner, an outlaw named Ute and an ex-prostitute known as Big Lola. When she meets Case Maxwell, who is hunting down the Culpepper gang for murdering his niece and nephew, Sarah is still quite certain that she hates sex. But after he is shot in her backyard, she can't help surreptitiously peeking at Case's bulging loincloth while she's patching up his handsome, bullet-riddled body. While he finds her equally irresistible, he firmly resists the idea of marriage or children. His desire for revenge against the Culpepper gang is matched by Sarah's quest to find a silver treasure that she knows is buried near her property. Case agrees to help Sarah find the cache, but suddenly there is a crisis when Conner falls into the hands of the vicious Ab Culpepper. Case proves himself a hero, and the finale is a rousing, old-fashioned shoot-'em-up worthy of Louis L'Amour. Though the dialogue is sometimes sappy, Lowell keeps her entertaining story moving briskly. (Nov.) FYI: Lowell also writes SF fantasy under the name Ann Maxwell and, as A.E. Maxwell, she coauthors mystery and suspense novels with her husband, Evan Maxwell.