More great (and politically incorrect) James M. Cain:(SPOILERS)Meet Graham Kirby, age 30, real estate entrepreneur and local booster. He has been successful so far in life, and clearly has a plan for continuing to be so. He has moved on from tough beginnings and is now the breadwinner in his extended family consisting of his mother and his childhood guardian. He lives and breathes real estate and we are treated to a description of every building and every room he visits over the course of the story. His obsessions in life do not seem to include any women ... although he has been able to work them in around the edges along the way. Meet his younger half-brother Burwell, (A Drew Peterson type) who does have an obsession with women. He is a serial date-rapist in an era before the term was fashioned and may have killed his first wife for some (doubly indemnified) insurance money. He seems to have had some success with the opposite sex using the very same technique that Bill Clinton used on Paula Jones in the Little Rock hotel room ... but back in the day, (it would seem) if the girl was interested, she hung around checking things out. Admiration would lead to fondling and ... well, I guess we all knows how that usually works out.Meet Sonya Lang, age 16 or so and a victim of Burwell Kirby's ways. She turns out to have the brains which drive the story ... and as is typical of a Cain novel, she has off-the-charts allure and sex appeal. We see this first hand as she prances in and out of outfits, bathtubs, showers and so in, all in the presence of "Grammie" who succumbs in about 30 seconds flat.In any event, Sonya gets knocked-up by Burwell, and her family relying on their own code of honor, seeks private redress rather than the filing of criminal charges ... ........................................These late-in-his-career Cain novels are engrossing on a number of levels. In this case, the character of Sonya introduced as a victim turns out to be the driving personality in the story. I also like the way his ambitious striving business-types are so obsessed with their selling. They fete us with insight into all of their little trade secrets. Nothing is illegal, but everything is clearly manipulative and the tactics are always cheap. Graham Kirby in this case, is providing for the woman who raised him by giving her an allowance ... but he seems to consider this to be an investment, since she owns 67 acres of land which is prime for development, and on which, she is gaming the IRS code. .........................................................In any case, throw all of this stuff together, A super-hot chick, a manipulative guy who is due to be out manipulated, some bad bloodlines in your family tree, and a setting just before the modern politically correct era, and you have the makings of an excellent James M. Cain style caper.
