Rainbow Dust

Rainbow Dust
Eleanor Roth
Treble Heart Books
ISBN: 1-932695-15-X
Fiction, Paranormal Romance
Reviewed by Arthur Chappell

Margaret is visited by the ghost of a cowboy called Zeke who abandoned family responsibility for adventures in the wilderness. He lost his rodeo job through a drunken stunt with one of the rodeo bulls. He sired a family with an Indian tribe, and much more besides. He quickly comes across as an insufferable selfish drunken adventurer, and not the romantic, lovable rogue he would like to be.
Eager for answers, Margaret contacts Zeke’s family. They accept her claims about him as genuine too easily. So does Margaret’s physician. The story needs somebody to take a more skeptical, critical stance if only for the sake of creating more conflict. Margaret is never in any real danger during her investigations. The story she uncovers should shock, as it involves murder, hidden bodies, incest and deception, but this is a tale of Christian forgiveness and Jewish beliefs on atonement and redemption. It is perhaps a too simple moral fable for a cynical modern readership. The values the book presents will seem dated and quaint even to many Christian and Jewish readers. In the hands of a thriller or horror writer this would be a story about angry vengeful ghosts, rather than what it is.
Many readers will be disappointed. That is not the fault of the author, but the nature of the modern reader. The book depicts the world, as it should be, rather than how many might think the world actually is, and that is an awful shame.