Why – in the country where the western was born, where masterpiece western movies like Stagecoach, Red River, and The Searchers can be found on classic movie channels, where rodeo is a popular sport, and the cowboy is an icon – are good western romance novels so hard to find? Take Sinfully Delicious for example. It’s not that it is really bad, it’s just that it isn’t good. It’s a strange combination of boring characters and over-the-top incidents. Plus, it’s cursed with odd turns of phrase that shook me out of the reading experience time and time again.

Cliff Baldwin left his Louisiana home after his drunken, unfaithful, abusive father drove Cliff’s mother to slit her wrists and die in her son’s arms. He took off for Texas, where he became know as the notorious bounty hunter, Bayou Baldwin. Cliff made a mint of money bounty hunting, but he feared it would kill his soul. Why, he might turn into a violent man like his father. The fact that he is killing only bad men doesn’t seem to cross his mind. After Cliff is forced to kill a very young man, he gets out of the bounty hunting business, buys himself a ranch, and settles down to raise some cattle. When his manly urges get too much for him, he visits Madame Lucy’s brothel.

One day, Kyra Lourdes comes to Madame Lucy’s looking for Cliff. She believes it’s a boarding house, and hilarity supposedly ensues as she discovers what “strange customs these Texans have.” Her family and Cliff’s were neighbors, and he was the brother she never had. When Kyra found herself in trouble at home, she ran away and tracked down Cliff to ask his help.

Kyra had been engaged to six men in six years. Her parents got sick of her breaking the engagements, and were going to force her to marry her current fiancé, Jacques Delacroix. But Kyra saw him stab his mistress to death, and he knows that she saw him. So she ran away. Trouble is, Jacques has hired a bounty hunter to bring Kyra back, dead or alive.

And so it goes. The bad guys chase Kyra and Cliff, they run off to a cabin where he angsts about having to kill and she occasionally does stupid things. Cliff brings in some of his bounty hunter friends for help. One of them is part Commanche, and another practices a new style of fighting he learned in the Far East (no, his name is not Kwai Chang Caine).

Kyra is so naive that she is almost silly – the whole thing about mistaking a brothel for a boarding house struck me as ridiculous. She keeps a journal and prattles on about it and how it has helped her to know herself like someone who has watched too much Oprah. As for Cliff – tall, dark and tortured is about all I can say for him.

Sinfully Delicious zipped along quickly. If you like western romances, you might find it agreeable, but I’m afraid the only impression it left on me was a bad one.