'The bayou bred danger

Those who lived on the bayou were wily as gators. Those who died on the bayou took their secrets with them. It was Tess Beaumont's bad luck to be in deep with both the living and the dead.

The drowning in Savannah Bayou was no more than a grim headline to Tess until she attempted to interview the victim's brother. Vance Gautreau was hard-bitten, dangerous, a man whose keen mind wouldn't settle for easy answers - and whose savage heart would settle for nothing less than a love as fierce as his own.

But Tess was a stranger to the society that lived by its own rules - and died by them. For in the bayou, passion was deadlier than hate.

' ( )

I'm slowly working my way through Rebecca York's backlist--the only problem is she's writing so darn fast that I'll never catch up. This one's from 1992.

Tess Beaumont is a TV reporter. She meets Vance Gautreau while doing a story on his sister's apparent suicide. He gets into an argument with the police and is thrown in jail; Tess bails him out at the behest of her boss so she can get a story.

It seems his sister isn't the first former guest on a popular talk show to end up dead, and Vance is determined to prove she was murdered. Tess smells a story, so she invites herself along on his investigation. By the time danger threatens them both, it's no longer just a story to her, and she's in too deep to back out.

There's also a mystery about Tess's past--she was raised by an aunt, and learned early on not to ask questions about her parents.

The mystery and suspense were quite well done, but I wasn't quite as convinced by the romance. Maybe that's because I never quite connected with Vance. Usually, I can get a sense of a character through their dialogue--for some reason, it's important to me to know how they sound, while descriptions of their physical appearance don't matter much. Hmmm... *thinking* No, it's not so much the sound of their voice as it is their "voice"--that is, their speech mannerisms, the words they use, whether they're verbose or laconic, etc. Anyway, for some reason, Vance just didn't sound real to me. Could be the bayou accent, but I've read other books--even ones by the same author--set in the bayou, and didn't have the same trouble.

Oh, well. I'm letting it go. It was a fun, quick read nonetheless. ( )