Her warm, passionate eyes and soft, giving body hid an evil and treacherous mind.He had to destroy this evil woman. This woman he had once wanted with an animal passion. She brought him back from a living death, rescued him from degredation. But that had been no act of kindness and love. It had been, instead, part of a deliberate and fiendish plan. For now she felt that she owned him, that his life was hers. And she would use him as a piece of machinery, to be discarded on the junk heap the minute his usefulness was over. Yes, he’d been allowed to live… only so he could die.
Land of the Eternal Sucker. That was Coral City, Slade County, Florida in 1956. By day, the tourist robbery is genteel… practiced by scrubbed and bowing clerks, merchants, and restauranteurs who wait all year to gouge and swindle out-of-town customers. But it’s at night that the real money is made… at tourist cabins, at cockfights, and at plush, private clubs where the only winner is the house and nobody seems to care. Nobody except Pop Seegar, who owns everything that makes money and ruins lives in Slade County.
This is life… stripped naked…
Robert Webster goes to Paris to find himself, and his creative soul, after doing hack-work as a Hollywood screenwriter. He finds Hildreath instead — rich, beautiful, dissolute, who fled to France to satisfy deep, carnal desires no American woman would dare admit to feeling. They begin an affair that’s comfortable and warm… until he makes a shocking discovery that reveals her raw, naked lust. There’s no love in what she’s doing. It’s coarse and cruel and undeniable... and it will shatter their lives.
Soldier McQuade is a prizefighter in New York who goes back to his rural home when his widowed sister-in-law dies, leaving behind two kids. He’s accompanied by Tennessee Bell, his other sister-in-law, who is on the run from a violent lover. But that simple, seemingly conventional starting point doesn’t begin to do this story justice… and to say more would spoil the stunning plot twists that veer shockingly away from every cliche. 
When someone needs bribing, beating or killing, the L.A. mob sends The Enforcer to do the job. He drives the flashiest cars, he wears the most expensive clothes, and he beds the hottest women. He has the connections and the money to buy just about anything… or anyone… that he wants.