STILL OF THE NIGHT

Stella St. Vallier, green-eyed and plucky, her nonagenarian great-aunt Rose, and old family retainer Maman are the last residents of Shadow Oaks, the near-bankrupt family plantation outside of Cane Town, Louisiana. While strolling the cane fields and musing one night, Stella observes P.G. Toutant, owner of the Scarlet Door strip club, and a corrupt local lawman’s deputy unloading drugs from a small plane. Does her neighbor Senator Leblanc, she wonders, condone this sort of behavior? Stella calls him and then faces down Toutant in his bar, where both he and his bouncer, a handsome hunk named Cowboy (actually US Marshal Garrett Shaw doing undercover work), tell her to cool her hyperactive imagination—nothing’s going on. Stella, however, is unconvinced, although all her throbbing, lovelorn instincts tell her to trust Cowboy, who’s soon wounded by the bad guys. She hides him away in a secret room and staunchly stares down the evil Sheriff Jervis when he comes calling. But Stella hasn’t heard the last of the forces of evil. She’ll have to deal with a weeping ghostly spirit, the truth about her parents’ “accident,” an attempt to burn down the plantation, and a drugging before she and the marshal can plan a future together.

Romantic-suspense veteran McKinney (In the Dark, 1998, etc.) ladles on the romance but forgets the suspense, producing patchwork intrigue whose ending is never in doubt.