Soft!

The waitress Glade Spencer--white-blond hair, perfect skin, just twenty-two years old--drifts innocent and waiflike through life, thus far avoiding harm to herself . . . Barker Dodds, hoping to shed his hard-man reputation, has fled his native Plymouth for a fresh start in London.
There, meanwhile, in an act of desperate inspiration, an ambitious young executive faced with a saturated market contrives a revolutionary strategy for introducing a new beverage, Soft!, that has all the potential of becoming the soft drink of the twenty-first century.
Once this highly confidential strategy develops unforeseen complications, Barker is paid a visit by
a friend from the old life, and soon is presented
with an unthinkable dilemma. And the person with whom he now shares a destiny--unbeknownst to her--is Glade.  
Rupert Thomson, author of The Insult ("A psychological thriller that has just about everything"
--Cleveland Plain Dealer), here explores the price of ambition, the difficulty of change or escape, and
the needs that drive us or that we ourselves create; and in Soft! he again transforms the conventions
of noir--whether contract-killing or romance or the classic double-cross--into fiction that is remarkably contemporary and strange.

Rupert Thomson is the author of four previous novels, three of which--The Five Gates of Hell, Air & Fire, and The Insult--are available in Vintage paperback. He lives in London.