Characters like Mackie Larkin, a suburban mother desperate for money, who finds she can earn it as a stripper Kevin Larkin, her ex-husband whose get-rich-quick schemes left her with a mountain of debt, and who now dreams up an even better one Lianne, their beautiful, impulsive teenage daughter, for whom almost anything, even bank robbery, is possible Jimmy Marz, the wrangler she loves, who gets a dangerous onetime offer that could take him to the life he's always wanted Buck Samsonov, the charismatic strip-club owner building a southwestern empire in the lawless style of a 19th-century robber baron Clay Krupsha, a twenty-first-century captain of detectives in a border town where no crime is what it seems and Nicholas Loeb, a struggling mystery writer whose encounter with an unstable muse entangles him in a web of true crime more mysterious than anything he imagined.

Utterly original, multilayered, and marked by the gripping suspense, sharp wit, and fascinating psychological insights for which Peter Abrahams has been acclaimed, here is a major work—a riveting story of modern-day desperadoes living their wildest dreams.