Two gritty, fast-moving novels set in the world of basketball by legendary crime writer Ralph Dennis.
This is the story of five people… of Elizabeth Carnes, driven by a desperate, aching passion to a mysterious lover who is the only one who can give her the physical release her devoted husband can’t provide… of George Carnes, spurned by his wife and forced to seek solace in the womanly warmth of his secretary, the deceptively placid Stella Sander, who hides a voracious sexual appetite…of Jon Steen, the complex, dangerous, bisexual artist who unlocks Elizabeth’s lust… and of Tracy Steen, Jon’s controlling wife, whose neurotic, all-consuming need for love and devotion will lead to a shattering end for them all.
Adventurers, dreamers, thieves and kings: sooner or later all of them come to Palm Springs, the most lavish, sensual playground on earth. But for the six strangers who arrive in a limousine from the Beverly Wilshire hotel, it’s many things: an erotic utopia waiting to be physically conquered, a final chance a redemption, a fresh start, and a shot at winning a billion-dollar prize: developing a patch of dry sand into a new, exclusive community for the mega-rich.
It's 1959. Matthew Scott is a widowed, alcoholic reporter from New York who seeks personal and professional redemption when he's sent to the Deep South to write about a town that is defying a U.S. Supreme Court decision to integrate blacks into schools. His mere presence is a catalyst that ignites long-buried racial, political, religious, and personal conflicts among the residents, both white and black, ripping the town apart. Those tensions violently explode when Scott is falsely arrested by the bigoted, tyrannical sheriff for the rape and murder of an out-spoken black schoolteacher.
A lost, previously unpublished novel from the late Ralph Dennis, author of the legendary Hardman series of crime novels. Now he takes a gritty, hard-boiled “police procedural” approach to 1980s college basketball, tracking a struggling, but ambitious team through a tumultuous season, approaching each game like a decisive battle in a bloody war.