From New York to Las Vegas, Merlyn and his brother Artie obey their own code of honour in the ferment of contemporary America a world of greed, lust, violence and betrayal, where the power of corruption and the corruption of power are nowhere better explored.

'Fame and wealth, skulduggery and cheating and pimping, love affairs and carnal arrangements, one scene following another pell-mell, all written with unflagging vitality... bawdy, comic, highly coloured, hypnotic. It would be a very cool reader indeed who did not devour the whole mixture greedily'