Several weeks after her husband's death, Janice Hughes packed what remained of her belongings into her Toyota Camry, left her daughter's apartment in Berkeley, and drove east into California's Great Central Valley, where the knee-high carpets of tule grass make the low, rolling hills look like sand dunes, and the California Aqueduct, with its rippling surface and wide concrete banks, flows south alongside Interstate 5. From there, Janice somehow ended up in the tiny town of Avenal, teaching seventh and eighth graders at Boswell Junior High.
Avenal sits in teh narrow valley between the tule-blanketed Kettleman Hills and the first rounded peaks of California's Coast Ranges. Its main street is just several blocks long, and city hall could easily be mistaken for a doctor's office. No one could see what such a small town had to offer a longtime San Franciscan like Janice Hughes.
To her fellow teachers, Janice mentioned a daughter who never came to visit. She wore her steel-colored hair in a pageboy cut and had a fondness for Native American jewelry, which gave birth to rumors that she was a lesbian. People suspected that when she wasn't working, she didn't spend much time in their town at all. But to her neighbors and colleagues, none of these speculations would have merited anything more than a passing mention if Janice had not become so dangerously obsessed with a thirteen-year-old boy named Caden McCormick.

Novel Extracts: (WARNING: (1) This is an EROTIC novel and has contains some explicit chapters/paragraphs/sections, as do some of these extracts, so if you are under 18 years or you find explicit material offensive, please go back. (2) Do not read any of these links if you have not yet read this novel as below are extracts from the novel.)

Temper
Blackmail
Traitor