LOVE’S SABOTEUR [Pioneers of the Romantic Western] by Marie de Nervaud

Love, betrayal, gunfights, and stolen kisses highlight this classic novel of a German threat to America's beef herds during WWII — written by the woman who pioneered the romantic western!

Dolores Rey: pampered daughter of the lush Southern California orchards, where the noise and battle of WWII seemed so far way, had been raised in luxury and affianced to a man of her own kind in whose veins flowed the blood of his titled ancestors.

She never dreamed that when she left the modern world of cars and airplanes to visit her uncle's ranch in Wyoming that she would be entering one little removed from the days of the Old West, a place where men still settled disputes with guns and the only practical means of travel was still by horseback.

Nor did she dream she would fall in love with a man of this West, Roy Pelgren, owner of the Lazy Nine ranch.

Roy Pelgren had had his heart broken twice. The first time when his colorblindness barred him from his dream of joining the the Air Force and battling Germany in the skies. The second time when his fiancée, a woman of the West he had grown up with, and whose love he had believed unshakable, eloped with a lieutenant, resplendent in uniform.

But Roy never dreamed that the Nazi menace might come to battle him face-to-face on his isolated ranch in the badlands of Wyoming, or what that meeting would portend for the United States that he loved.

Nor did he dream that he would fall in love a high-born woman from a very different culture and way of life.

Now, Dolores and Roy's growing love for each other would be tested not only by their different personalities, backgrounds and stations in life – but by the forces of a war being waged far across continents and oceans in lands they had never seen.

Soon they would learn that people they had known and trusted all their lives were not what they seemed but part of a diabolical plot to devastate the United States agricultural heartland.

Together and separately Dolores and Roy would be targeted for death, capture, torture and worse. For, saboteurs were at work, and the man directing them aimed not only to destroy the great cattle herds on which America's civilians and troops depended for meat, but their own love for each other. To survive they would need all the courage and vision that had helped their forebears create the West itself.

Marie de Nervaud was the author of more than twenty book-length western romances most published during the 1930s and '40s in serial form in the magazines of the era. But due to prevailing prejudices against westerns written by women, only a few were ever published in book form. Her grandparents helped pioneer Oregon in the mid-1800s, and their papers, as well as her own, currently reside in the UofO library Special Collections department.