More Than Just a Pole
A QUIRKY SATIRIC THRILLER
HARD CANDY! A STRIPPER BY NIGHT/ COLLEGE STUDENT BY DAY!
RARELY HAS A MIX OF SEX, MAYHEM AND DEATH
BEEN SO ENTERTAINING!
HARD CANDY! Candice Summers, stage name “Candi,” is the star stripper at Nockers’ Up-Town Bar and Grille. By day, she attends an ultra-conservative college. In pursuit of her dream of becoming a writer of romance novels, she enrolls in summer writing workshops at a remote conference center in the Wallowa mountains of northeastern Oregon. The star attraction at the conference is an aging Russian refugee poet, Viktor Karshenko, who is mistakenly thought by all involved, including the conference organizers, to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature along with its million dollar honorarium.
Together Candi’s ex-boyfriend, Jesse Zafarelli, aka Red Hawk, a chronically unemployed, small-time criminal, boozer and drug user (who claims he is really a Nez Perce Indian) and a Neanderthal bouncer from the club, Big Cal, plot to kidnap Karshenko and hold him for ransom in the alpine wilderness. Jesse hopes to win Candi back and retire to Belize with big bucks, and Big Cal, too, has desires for Candi. Once the kidnapping takes place, the plot begins to unravel dramatically as Jesse and Cal, in their incompetence, find events rapidly spinning out of control and their hopes for riches and Candi, as well as their lives and hers, suddenly in serious jeopardy.
“I just finished your wonderful book. What a romp!” – Linda Evodia Hult, author, A Bird on the Wing