Vermilion

Vermilion is a novel of romantic suspense by Phyllis A. Whitney, published in 1981 and set partly in the red rock country of Arizona.

Lindsay Phillips has been hearing the voice she calls Vermilion since childhood, telling her to go to Arizona, and for years she has managed not to listen to it. She cannot shut it out any longer, and she knows exactly what is waiting for her in the country of the red rocks: the man who murdered her father, the cane with the dragon's head that she associates with torment and death, and Rick, whom she loved at seventeen and who married her older half-sister, Sybil. Going means putting herself within reach of all of it. The novel follows what happens when she does, and Whitney writes it as suspense in which the danger and the attraction arrive together, so Lindsay's difficulty is that the voice urging her towards Arizona may not have her interests at heart.

The book belongs to a long line of Whitney's suspense novels in which a heroine returns to a place connected to her family's past and finds that the past has been waiting for her.