[In the following review, the critic describes the plot and characters of Fever Pitch and praises Waters's depiction of arduous desert travel.]

Fever Pitch can loosely be termed a story of action, yet one cannot limit it by that classification, for it includes a great deal of characterization, and action here means the steady progress toward a fixed goal rather than the succession of adventures we usually associate with that term.

We learn from Arvilla, a dancing girl in a Mexican town on the edge of the desert, that there exists within the desert a land called the Land of the Lizard Woman. This land consists of what rocks and sands were left after the rest of the world was made, and was given to the Lizard Woman by God to keep forever as her own. Here, claims Arvilla, is much gold, and to it she wants to return with some man who can prove that the ore she and James Horne found is really gold. She prevails upon Lee Marston, an engineer, to accompany her to the place in that land beyond "Los Llanos de Los Perdidos"—"The Plains of the Lost"—where Horne is still waiting.

In the beginning of their journey toward their goal Marston thinks but little of Horne, but later he realizes that it was he toward whom he was inevitably led, and that Arvilla's lures and fascinations were but incidental in her whole scheme to lead him through the desert in order to prove that what she and Horne had found was really gold. He finally realizes that

her very force was a vagrant wind from that torrent which has for ages swept man into madness. Gold!—great cakes of it!—had filled her desire to bursting, and the trickle of its dust made never-ending music to her senses. Every kiss and promise at the start had held the lure of its yellow bubbles of wealth, and every torture had been a further urge to its garnering.

This knowledge and Arvilla's easy relation with Horne caused him to lose whatever feeling he had for this woman of indomitable desire, and a time comes when he kills Horne and flees back across the desert.

He is found unconscious several miles from the town whence he started, and some miles further away Arvilla is found, dead. She had followed him on foot, but had not been able to catch up with him. When he at last could speak coherently, Marston's tale—since neither the place where he had been nor Horne's body were ever found—was accepted as the tale of a crazy man.

The story of their trek across the desert provides the greater part of the story, and one feels the heat, the hardships, the privations, the harshnesses and brutalities of their monotonous daily grind to reach their destination. No attempt is made to alleviate the starkness of reality in a life such as theirs; there is no evasion, for the ease of the reader's mind, of what the body must endure in an adventure such as this, nor of the physical tortures that are suffered. Those pages in which the tedious march across the desert is depicted are the best in the book.

It is here that we see Arvilla as she is, inflexible, ruthless, determined, fixed in her purpose. She is hard and indomitable, and seemingly devoid of feeling, the embodiment of materialistic pursuit. It is she who is the leader of the expedition; Lee Marston follows almost in a dream, guided by the will of the stronger Arvilla. His motive in enduring the horrors of that journey can be traced to some power beyond his control which leads him inevitably on.