Young, sexy, unhappy Mamie works at a diner on a desolate highway outside of Sacramento....where she has a hot, satisfying physical relationship with a rouastabout without any real financial prospects. So when Karl Brandon, a local rancher nearly twice her age, proposes marriage, she accepts, trading money and security over passion and love. But she soon realizes that the comforts of a fine home and the life of a homemaker aren't enough to make her happy...or to satisfy her aching needs, which grow more insistent with each passing day. A chance meeting with a former lover ignites Mamie's desperate hunger, sweeping them both up in a torment of lust and looming tragedy.Mamie Brandon By Jack Sheridan
Young, sexy, unhappy Mamie works at a diner on a desolate highway outside of Sacramento....where she has a hot, satisfying physical relationship with a rouastabout without any real financial prospects. So when Karl Brandon, a local rancher nearly twice her age, proposes marriage, she accepts, trading money and security over passion and love. But she soon realizes that the comforts of a fine home and the life of a homemaker aren't enough to make her happy...or to satisfy her aching needs, which grow more insistent with each passing day. A chance meeting with a former lover ignites Mamie's desperate hunger, sweeping them both up in a torment of lust and looming tragedy.
It's 1953. The dreary smattering of one-room, brick buildings called the Paradise Motel on the outskirts of Tehachapi is a symbol of Teresa "Trace" Conklin's marriage to her drunken husband Walt, who owns the place... and who haunts cheap bars and cheaper women. But then a quiet stranger breezes into their dead-end California town, a man who sees in Trace's thin, tired face her lost beauty, her broken dreams, and maybe even a spark of hope. And then everything changes for them all in an earthquake of emotion, violence, and destruction.