Roy Dillon is young, good-looking and devastatingly charming. He's also a completely amoral con man. Lily, his mother, works for the mob. Moira Langtry, Roy's mistress, is always looking for the main chance, and so is Carol Roberg, the nurse brought in to look after Roy when a bad choice of mark means he has an unfortunate encounter with a baseball bat and a bad case of internal bleeding. Together they make up a perverse quadrangle of love and greed in a coruscating novel of corruption.THE AUTHORJim Thompson (1906-1977) was born in Oklahoma. He wrote nearly thirty novels, including THE GRIFTERS and THE GETAWAY, which has been filmed twice, and two screenplays for the Stanley Kubrick films "The Killing" and "Paths of Glory".