‘Rustler’ cooks up intrigue in sexy Western

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By BARBARA RIXSTINE / For the Lincoln Journal Star

(“The Rustler” by Linda Lael Miller, HQN Books, 379 pages, $7.99 paperback).

Outlaw Wyatt Yarbro can’t seem to stay away from serendipity. First, it saves him from rustling again — good. But then it puts him square under the spell of Ms. Sarah Tamlin when he arrives in Stone Creek. Good or bad?

The college-educated, poker-playing, opinionated Sarah, however, has her own problems.  Charles Longstreet, a dangerous character from her past, has arrived with a secret that could squander the work she and her father, Ephriam, have put not only into their bank, but into their lives.

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Can Wyatt and Sarah build a life together? Will her secret be revealed? Does it all work out in the end? Guess.

New York Times best-selling author Linda Lael Miller is highly successful at pacing the reader along, building interesting characters and keeping the dialogue traditional Western-speak, even down to Wyatt thinking of the bargirls as “soiled doves.”

But before you think you’ve got a great gift for great-grampa, who fondly recalls the Zane Greys and Louis L’Amours of his youth, read some of the more physical scenes. It’s not often in our Western lore that you find a handsome, rugged career outlaw who cooks better than the heroine, likes children and dogs and shows clearly, over several pages, that he’s a fabulous, intuitive lover.

I guess I never recognized that about Randolph Scott.

Anyway, quit worrying about reading stuff that the schoolmarm said was good for you and enjoy reading just for fun with “The Rustler.”

Barbara Rixstine regrets not living in Paris in the 1920s.