A Man’s Touch pits hired gun Dalton MacKenzie against himself when he is hired to clear a Wyoming valley for a wealthy rancher and his duplicitous daughter. Because, against all odds, this killer has fallen in love with the plain and decent Jude Amos, who represents to him all that can be good in the world. And Jude Amos is one of the women he is supposed to chase out of the valley, using any means at his disposal.

With such an interesting premise, one would expect a quick and interesting read. While this certainly was an interesting read, it was anything but quick. Even so, I found myself picking it up again and again, needing to finish what the author had begun.

Rosalyn West has tackled many traditional Western themes and archetypes here. There is the “Code of the West,” the soul-less gunfighter, the cattle rancher versus the farmer (as opposed to the sheep ranchers so often seen in movies about the West), the stage coach station, the inscrutible and wise Native American, and the strong pioneer woman.

After being blinded and injured in a robbery, Dalton wakes up in the care of an angel of mercy, Jude Amos. She knows he’s a dangerous man, but not that he’s her enemy. His cynical view of the world cannot allow him to accept her kindness at face value. She, on the other hand, cannot understand why she is coming to care for him.

Rather than get bogged down in a synopsis you can read elsewhere, suffice it to say that these two people of honor come to clash with each other at every turn. Still, their feelings for one another cannot be denied and each must decide how to remain honorable, true to one another, and true to themselves.

The author makes a few missteps along the way. For one thing, there is too much “pretty” language that has no place on the range. For example:

• Dalton, upon trying to convince himself that Jude is not for him, thinks: “The image of Jude Amos’ damp lips gently parted and swollen like a new blown rose tantalized him.”
• Dalton’s expectations of what Jude looks like clash with her plain reality thusly, “He’d expected so much more, and he was brooding over the loss of those expectations like a child who’d anticipated fancy cross gartered silk hose for Christmas and had to settle for plain wool socks.”

It is difficult for this reviewer to imagine a man, especially a 19th century western hero, thinking about such things and thinking about them in the manner he does.

Then too, I had trouble with the author’s penchant for trying to create sexual tension after each disturbing encounter. She had them kissing after every “real” moment, fight, and near-death experience. While some authors do build up wonderful sexual tension after fights that read like verbal foreplay, this author was unable to do so.

It was only after they finally came together intimately that their kissing and other love scenes worked.

Dalton is a difficult hero to accept. It is a testament to the author’s skill that the reactions he had time and time again made sense only if he was the cynical, soul-less killer he was. While I fought against him being hero material, the author brought me around in the end.

The author’s use of the less-than-beautiful heroine theme was traditional in that Jude became beautiful to Dalton over time. There is nothing wrong with using a traditional theme and Rosalyn West used it to good end in A Man’s Touch. Still, the contrast between Jude and the other female figures in this book was a bit overdone on an archetypal level. There was The Prostitute, The Femme Fatale, and The Pioneer Woman and not much in-between.

The use of archetypes extended to most characters in this book. While the author used them effectively, most of the secondary characters, with the exception of Joseph, the wise Native American uncle, were too close to being one-note characters for this reviewer.

Where does that leave the reader in terms of a recommendation? I think this book has important things to say. While it says those important things well on occasion, at other times it says them less well. Still, when an author can convince me to care about a hero who seems generally unheroic, I think she’s done something special.