Chloe Sommers is in a bind. She needs to sell her cattle at the railhead before the taxes on her ranch are due or she will end up forfeiting her land to local baddie Calvin Talbot. The first problem is that she has no hired gun to protect her drovers on the cattle drive and Talbot will use any means possible to stop her from reaching the railhead. The second problem is that the ranch is not really her land – but we’ll come to that later.

The timely arrival of Desperado Jones in Trouble Creek may provide Chloe with a solution to the first problem. But he is averse to working for a woman, particularly one in trousers, and turns her offer of a job down flat. Things turn about when Calvin Talbot hires Desperado to act as a traitor. Desperado will work for Chloe, while actually helping Talbot sabotage the cattle drive. Desperado’s strange code of ethics, which precludes cold-blooded murder and working for women (in that order, I think), glosses over betrayal, backstabbing, and “other minor infractions” for which he has, in fact, served time.

Desperado is the fastest gun in the west, of course, and so Chloe reluctantly accepts his explanation for changing his mind about working for her (he wants to work for a beautiful boss). After a series of mishaps at the ranch that do nothing to dissuade Chloe from her intended cattle drive, Chloe and Desperado set out with only a passel of teenage cowboys between them (Talbot scared all the experienced cattle drovers off) and their attraction to one another.

Gunslinger folds in further complications without managing to heighten the tension or the conflict. Desperado, we learn in the first chapter, is actually Chloe’s long-lost-believed-dead-half-breed-step-brother (are you still with me?) to whom the ranch actually belongs. Chloe does not know this, however. And Calvin Talbot’s son Tate, who Chloe once planned to marry before he raped her, nurses an obsession with Chloe that could be termed pathological if he only seemed more capable of inflicting actual harm.

Chloe is not believable as a rape victim. She succumbs to Desperado, a man she barely knows, with the quivering responsiveness of a woman whose first experience was not so violent she bled for a week and couldn’t ride her horse. She suffers Tate’s continual assaults without much emotional fallout. And Tate is never called to account for his “drunken enthusiasm.” And because I found this aspect of the novel so disturbing for its lack of realism, I tended to revise each mention of the rape to “attempted rape” in order to more accurately account for the reactions of the characters.

Connie Mason’s latest is almost totally a plot-driven novel and the idea for the plot, which has the hero helping the villain run the heroine off her land, is unconventional and therefore appealing. Gunfights, stampedes, fires, and other various excitements follow hot on the heels of one another so quickly that Chloe and Desperado’s ability to wrangle as much time together as they do is a true feat. But even with all this adventure, the conflict never builds to a point that had me rapidly turning the pages. Desperado’s hidden identity does not present a real problem because he has no real desire to settle down. The Talbots’ plans for mayhem are easily foiled and never seem menacing enough to create much real danger. And Chloe and Desperado end up in bed again and again without much difficulty, usually after Tate, who is wounded in one way or another during the entire novel, has launched another attempt to rape Chloe and is run off by Desperado.

The dialogue serves only to move the plot forward in the most obvious of ways. Each person states his or her own motivations and internal emotions in the baldest of terms. There is no subtlety, no internal character development and characters change their minds about key issues (like love) in the spaces between sentences. There is no real internal world in Gunslinger. Desperado is a desperado. When he changes his name from Desperado to the one from his boyhood, he becomes no longer a gunslinging desperado. It’s that easy.

On the novel’s back cover Desperado Jones blows into Trouble Creek “on a raw April wind.” I liked that sentence. It set a tone of ruthlessness and desperation and hope. I wanted to read a novel like that. Despite my optimism, I finished the book with only a memory of the promise of that raw April wind and the assurance that, despite their lackluster adventures, Desperado and Chloe will live happily ever after – because they state explicitly that they plan to do just that.