The Ringmaster - Hardcover

Hardy, Jean

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684801701 ISBN 13: 9780684801704

Publisher: Sunshine Pr Pubns, 1995

Synopsis

Eden Page, America's darling and supermodel, sees her enchanted existence begin to crumble when her dark past threatens to catch up with her

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Alexandre Dumas will be rolling over in his grave if he hears about the pseudonymous Hardy's first novel, an inept and twisted variation on The Count of Monte Cristo . In 1979, Vince Perriera, a small-time hood from the Baltimore streets, discovers the financial plight of the L'Arranzas, married Argentine physicians in the States on student visas to further their medical training. At the same time, he begins to prey upon a trio of students at a small Annapolis college. The L'Arranzas are enticed by Vince into stealing drugs from their hospital; one of the students, Sloane, a blase Connecticut socialite eager for a fling, is seduced and impregnated by him; another, Nigel, from a good family but broke, is led astray by Vince's promise of easy money; the third student, starry-eyed Patricia, who's half-Chaco Indian, half-Irish, is drugged and forced to participate in an orgy. After a local teenager narrowly escapes death from Vince's cocaine, the hoodlum is sent to prison. Freed after only seven years, he dubs himself "the Ringmaster" and takes revenge upon his former victims, all now highly successful, who had testified against him. Along the way, Vince also stumbles onto the L'Arranzas' perilous experiments with killer bees, spinning the novel into a nightmarish turn that bids adieu to the Ringmaster--but, unfortunately, not to the novel, which lingers on for a trial and more.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

The circus allusion is to a porno film in which Hardy's heroine Eden Page is induced to perform while under the influence of drugs, alcohol, and torture. The trials she endures for the supposed mercy killing of the drug lord Vincent Perrierawho dragged her into his nasty worldare a sort of circus, too. The prosecutor insists that the murder was planned and that the killer bees that had supposedly attacked and maimed the victim were a fiction. They are not a fiction, either in the novel or in life, for the publication of this book is timed to coincide with the appearance of the first swarms of killer bees in Los Angeles. How's that for marketing? Otherwise, this is a fairly ordinary, sleazy novel about a girl who meets a bad boy and works hard to shake off her wicked past (and does so by writing a novel, then making a million-dollar movie deal to purge her conscience). Denise Perry Donavin

About this edition

• Publisher: Sunshine Pr Pubns
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0684801701
• ISBN 13: 9780684801704
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 452