TWISTER

Welcome to Paradise, Texas, where boom times have flown as fast as the tornado that roars through town, leaving attorney Jack Eames half-buried under the walls of his house. Burned-out journalist Edward Thomas, on assignment to investigate the attack on Sam Houston Cain, another lawyer who was beaten with the jawbone of an ass, soon finds that Eames was shot—maybe by his former lover Margaret Masters, the high-school teacher who taught the Song of Solomon and was fired by censorship zealots stirred up by hellacious preacher Sam Dash. ``God and the Devil are wrestling for the American soul out in West Texas,'' says Thomas sagely, but the crime and detection provided by Lantigua (Burn Season, Heat Lightning)—involving revenge for a decades-old land swindle—aren't nearly as gripping or consequential as the aggressive symbol-mongering would suggest.