Bride on the Run is a mail-order bride story with a potboiler plot. So many disasters befall its characters that they spend their time reeling from one crisis to another, with hardly any time to breathe. While the prose is interesting, the relentless pace makes for an exhausting read.

Anna DeCarlo is a saloon singer in 1889 Missouri. She is on the way to her fiancé’s office when she sees the police chief exiting with another man. He sees her but lets her go on to the office, where she discovers her fiancé’s body. The murderous chief guessed – correctly – that Anna would do everything to incriminate herself short of rolling around in the evidence, so he left her to it. Anna runs, but the chief is not content to have her disappear. He wants her dead.

Anna gets as far as Salt Lake City, where her money runs out. In desperation, she signs on to be a mail-order bride to a man living in a remote canyon along the Colorado River. This measure struck me as needlessly drastic, but the contract can be broken by either party and neither Anna nor her future husband treat the marriage as something that will last.

Malachi Stone sizes Anna up and of course she’s not what he wanted. He concludes she’s a conniving whore and not the respectable maternal workhorse he needed. Their trip home is fraught with peril – the wagon axle breaks, a storm comes up, and Anna’s mule is lost to a landslide. This sequence is typical for this novel; on average there’s a new crisis every 20 pages or so, ranging from a cow in the quicksand to a deathly ill child to a custody battle with Malachi’s former in-laws.

As Joe Bob Briggs would put it, there’s too much plot getting in the way of the story. The characters are buffeted from one disaster to another without much chance to make an impression on us. The impressions they do make are often negative. The dependence on plot makes both characters seem passive; if Malachi can see at a glance that Anna won’t do, then why does he bring her home? Malachi and Anna would rather make assumptions about each other than have a conversation. There’s also an unappealing lack of self-awareness. Anna entered the marriage under entirely false pretenses – she never intended to stick around, and she hopes Malachi will pay her way to California – but that doesn’t stop her from lashing out at Malachi’s judgments as if she had entered into the bargain in good faith. She spends half her time feeling guilty that she’s not what the family needed, the other half in high dudgeon when anyone else feels that way. It’s a series of epiphanies to Anna that Malachi’s family went through a lot of effort, expense, and emotional stress to bring her out to them, and that accepting the bargain in bad faith was Not Nice.

While the prose sometimes gets overly dramatic, it’s pretty good overall, with a few wry observations that I quite liked. The characters have interesting backgrounds, and I wish more time were spent exploring them and exploring how the past affected their present-day behavior. It’s hard to get to know people when the resolution of one crisis means they’re only that much closer to the next one. Bride on the Run has its moments, but unless you like your melodrama straight up, I wouldn’t recommend it.