It's not surprising that Dixie Flannigan comes across as 250 pounds of attitude stuffed into a 120-pound package. As a Texas prosecutor turned bounty hunter, Dixie has to intimidate a collection of much larger males into believing she's capable of doing them serious harm if they try to escape her clutches. In her debut thriller, Chris Rogers pushes just hard enough on Dixie's tough-talking image to make her believable, and then drops her into a story where her smartness and humanity become equally important. Transporting an escaped prisoner through a South Dakota snowstorm, Dixie slowly finds herself believing him when he insists that somebody else killed the 11-year-old girl he's accused of running over while drunk. We believe him, too: the wisecracking Dixie isn't the only soft touch in town.