Catherine Anderson Summer Breeze

Summer Breeze

Catherine Anderson

Signet, Jan 2006, $7.99, 432 pp.

ISBN: 0451217101

In 1889 seventy years old Darby McIntosh rides to Joseph Paxton's ranch with a bullet in his back. He asks Joseph to watch over his beloved Rachel Marie Hollister, who is all alone with the person who murdered her family a few years ago coming for her. After stopping the blood flow, Joseph gets the doctor and his brother David the sheriff to see the critically wounded ranch foreman.

Joseph and David head to Rachel's ranch where they find her home totally barricaded. She refuses to talk to them. Joseph breaks through a wooden barred window, but she fires her shotgun at him. His dog Buddy follows him and he pleads with her not to shoot his canine. He assumes she is nuts, but lies down in the hallway anyway as he promised. The next morning Joseph joins David to interrogate the nasty Pritchard family and Rachel's Aunt Amanda. Joseph detests the Pritchards and assumes they are the killers. As he stays with Rachel, she begins to trust him. To his shock he falls in love especially after she kills him at poker, but first he must find a way to allow her to feel safe when he is not there.

This historical romance is fully driven by a strong cast especially the intriguing lead female and the man who has come to love and understand her. Fans will hope they find a way to be together although Joseph's constant denial of not marrying can become irritating. Still that is minor in retrospect as the audience will enjoy this deep nineteenth century drama starring a battle fatigue trauma victim and the wise hero who learns that she is the woman who has opened the world for him not visa versa.

Harriet Klausner