BURNING MOON

A dumb, spunky caper in which two women and a transvestite rob a hotel bank in Grand Teton National Park and make off over the mountains with their loot. Ruth has just spent two years working in a San Francisco boutique and hating every dull moment of it. She has a three-year-old daughter but no father for the child--and life is simply not worth living on its present terms. She and her friend Alice and transvestite postal-worker Norman devise the big robbery scheme: Norman creates a distraction with his drag outfit while the two women, with guns, hit the bank; then all three escape to a point on the river where they leave a false trail that includes a sack full of wigs and falsies so that the cops will think that three men have done the job. Then Norman, with two inflatable dummies, creates still another false trail while the two women hike over the mountain with the bags of money. Norman is to meet them beyond any roadblocks on the other side, but the rangers aren't all that dumb and set out after the women in the hills and begin closing in on them beyond the snow-line. The climax at first seems to be none too lively, but then does a backflip that is satisfactorily entertaining. Only problem: despite the author's attempts to seduce our sympathies, the heisters are simply not believably motivated. Unpersuasive but well-paced.