For All Time

Stacie Brannigan, the widowed mother of two, has been avidly reading her great-grandmother Anastasia Wysse's journal in preparation for her part in a dramatization of the 1870s' Texas-Indian wars. Just prior to the performance, Stacie visits an elderly Indian healer; as the show begins, rifle shots are fired, Stacie falls unconscious--and awakes to find herself in 1872 living the life of Anastasia. She has been found by the dark, handsome Joseph Muldoon. Half Indian and half Irish, he has some lessons in love to teach the young widow whose own marriage had been without passion. Stacie's efforts to leave her great-grandmother's life and reenter her own are complicated by her growing feelings for Joseph. Another aged Indian shaman advises her: ``You will find your way back to your time . . . only after you learn something here. Then you must go through a tunnel if you are to get back.'' The triteness of Bond's ( Deep Purple ) writing and the rather improbable plot complications--such as Stacie's marriage to her own great-grandfather--are balanced by the tenderness of Stacie and Joseph's love. (Nov.)