In this novel, a powerful, wrenching story

of a couple locked in a tragic embrace, the

author of two nonfiction best sellers--the

classic Against Our Will: Men, Women and

Rape and the equally brilliant Femininity--

now achieves a triumph as a writer of

fiction.

"Early oue morning in November 1987,"

Susan Brownmiller writes in her Foreword,

"the silence was broken on a quiet residen-

tial street in Greenwich Village. In re-

sponse to an emergency call, police and

paramedics entered a dark apartment and

found an unconscious six-year-old girl.

Three days later she died.

"It couldn t have happened here. But it

did. The day the child died, I began to write,

to imagine how the coople from nay neigh-

borhood whose image flashed repeatedly

across the television screen--a lawyer and a

womau with a bashed-in face who had once

been a writer--could have traveled the dis-

tance from people I might have known to

such a uightmare, and why the ample

warning signs were misperceived and mis-

interpreted by those in a position to sound

the alarm

"Impelled from start to finish by the

haunting face of a spirited little girl with

red hair," Susan Brownmiller was moved to

create a fast-talking hustler who lives by his

own rules, and a woman who adores him--

to invent their lives together from a first

encounter at a Village street fhir through

years increasingly darkened by drugs and

mental and physical destruction.