Harlequin Super Romance #574 Doc Wyoming

ISBN 0373705743 - You know the formula: boy and girl meet and dislike each other. One of them develops feeling for the other, pursues and catches them. Some silly misunderstanding, often involving another person, drives them apart and, still, despite all odds, they find their way back together. Well, forget all that. Finally, a romance novel that breaks the moldy old mold. Dixie Sheldon is going to pay her dues by doing three years as the general practitioner is a tiny town in Wyoming. When it's finally over, she'll be on her way up the career ladder in California. That's the plan, anyway - until she meets Hal Blane, sheriff of the tiny town. Hal comes from a long line of bad guys and his family is cursed by the tainted blood of criminals. His great-grandfather's final crime has led the family to lose their land and their good name and Hal is obsessed with that history. Dixie finds herself drawn into the drama when she begins dating Hal AND treating his mother for stress. Out on land that once belonged to Hal's family, paleontologists come across a body and the mystery begins to unravel. With the help of one of the paleontogists, Dixie reconstructs the man's face. An old local woman teaches Dixie folk medicine and just happens to be the one living witness to the time of the man's murder. As the pieces come together, Hal and Dixie find themselves and their loved ones in great danger. They have to find the answers to a 100 year old mystery and save Hal's family's future and redeem their past before it's too late! I hope Brondos writes something other than romance, because she's proven she's too good to pigeon-hole herself that way. More mystery than romance, Doc Wyoming makes me hopeful for the genre, anyway. There were a few things that could have, and should have, been written better. The way that Hal and Dixie were oblivious to what was going on while he was in the hospital is ridiculous - his son and his mother were both in very serious peril and no one bothered to pass that info along for a couple days? Why someone would take the gold coin found with the body and replace it with a dime is beyond dumb - why replace it with anything? And Brondos stealing, without creditting, a line from Jim Croce's "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" ("jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces gone", page 18) just annoyed me. Other than that, excellent. If more romance novels were this well done, I'd read more of them!