Sally Alder is a couple of ears past her wild youth as the hard-drinking, guitar playing, hell-raising singer known as Mustang Sally. But then she's grown with age, She's wiser and more coolheaded now, and, more important, Sally has learned how to keep a secret. It's a good thing, too, because she's going to need every advantage she's gained in order to handle the job she's just taken.

Imagine having to move from LA to Laramie to get a thrill.

A professor of history at UCLA, Sally has just been offered the hugely endowed and deliciously secretive Dunwoodie Distinguished Chair in American Women's History at the University of Wyoming. Job description: Move into the late Meg Dunwoodie's posh residence in Laramie (the only one of its kind) and, with sole proprietors of her papers, construct the definitive Meg Dunwoodie biography--without telling anyone anything about it.

Imagine having to move from LA to Laramie to get a thrill.

In this town, rumors abound and secrets are practically nonexistent.

Of course, everyone knows that Sally has been hired to poke through old Meg's papers, and a lot of people think that somewhere among them sits a treasure map that could lead to a fortune in gold Krugerrands. Oneway or another, most of Laramie is determined to getinto Meg Dunwoodie's house.

There are break-ins, a curious sheriff, gossipy friends, and avaricious faculty at the university. And, if that isn't enough to distract Sally from her research, sexy Hawk Green has shown up to rekindle a romance Sally thought was gone forever.

But all this goes deeper and the stakes are higher thanSally could have imagined. As she delves intoMeg's romantic and heartbreaking past as a foreigncorrespondent in Paris during World War II, the forces of good and evil are aligning in Laramie, and Sally realizes that, truly, those who don't learn from their pasts are doomed to repeat it.

In the tradition, of Susan Isaacs and Fannie Flagg, Virginia Swift has written a story that breaks the mold, with a cast of finely drawn characters and a heroine whose wit and intelligence are matched only by herdetermination.

Virginia Scharff