Where there's smoke

Brown's 16-year-old romance novel delivers a fair amount of heavy-breathing, which might be enough to satisfy her fans in spite of a contrived plot that includes, near the end, an unbelievable action-adventure sequence set in the Caribbean. The heroine is a feisty doctor, Lara Mallory, whose infamous affair with Sen. Clark Tackett aborted his presidential campaign and may have prompted his suicide. Mallory, who has set up her medical practice in the small Texas town run by Tackett's oil-rich family, is vilified by the stern Tackett matriarch, who vows to destroy her, and by the late senator's hell-raising brother, who makes it his business to insult and degrade her. But darn if that old boy don't jus' feel an attraction growin'. Anyone assuming that there is only one basic accent spoken in the Lone Star state will change their mind after sampling reader Ross's variety of voices-from socially prominent grand dames to unassuming oil field workers. Both she and the author are native Texans-and, as is the case with the romantic leads, both are on much firmer ground on their native soil than struggling through a bogus Caribbean battlefield. A Grand Central hardcover. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

More frustrated passion, political scandal, and true Texas grit from Brown--this featuring the simmering love-hate bond between cool, beautiful Dr. Laura Mallory and the savage blue-eyed younger brother of the politician whose life she reputedly destroyed. The mystery is why Dr. Mallory set up practice in Eden Pass, Texas, in the first place. The focus of a national scandal when she was photographed years before being escorted in her nightgown from young Senator Clark Tackett's Virginia home by her husband, Ambassador Randall Porter, Mallory and Porter were summarily banished to the no-account Caribbean nation of Montesangre--where Porter and their baby daughter were murdered in a rebel ambush, while Tackett drowned in a Texas fishing accident that may have been a suicide. Mallory returned to the States to find her professional name permanently sullied and, in desperation, accepted the modest doctor's home and office that a remorseful Tackett had deeded her in his tiny hometown of Eden Pass. Predictably, Mallory is shunned by a community ruled by Tackett's mother, Jody, the iron-willed widowed dowager of Tackett Oil and Gas. But the beautiful doctor accepts the situation, living meekly off her savings until Tackett's reckless, handsome younger brother, Key, returns from the Middle East. Then she goes to work to convince Key--who is, naturally, torn between loathing the good doctor and wanting to tear off her clothes--to fly her to Montesangre to locate the site of her daughter's grave. Murder, terror, dark hints of concealed homosexuality, and the shocking resurrection of husband Porter follow as the backdrop to Mallory and Key's romance (``I don't want to be one of Key Tackett's women.'' ``Yes, you do. Tonight you do''), making for an unusually perilous and gruesome journey toward marriage and a house on the lake. More sophisticated than Brown's Texas! books, this mainstream romance could well expand her already enormous readership. (First printing of 250,000; Literary Guild Dual Selection for Spring)