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For me, reading Phyllis Whitney is like traveling through time, and I genuinely enjoy all her books for their perspective on the time they were written. She researches the settings of her books, which are often quite exotic, so reading them becomes pleasantly informative. Vermillion is set in Sedona, Arizona, and I was transported there. Whitney is flawless at descriptions, both physical and psychological. She is the pinnacle author of her genre: romantic mystery, and she is my literary guilty pleasure.

Perhaps because the further the "time travel," the better, I prefer the works she wrote in the 1960s to her later works. Vermillion was published in 1981. It does not hold up to my favorite Whintey stories. I found the love interest (sister and brother-in-law) a bit shallow, and the existence of an "imaginary friend" with both strength and purpose was too off-genre for me. To its credit, visualizing the story with its Native American art and its rocky desert wilderness was a treat, and the action was suspenseful.