"An Otto Penzler book."

Sixteen-year-old Katya Spiva is walking with her two summer babysitting charges in Bayhead Harbor, New Jersey, when she's approached by silver-haired gentlemanly Marcus Kidder, a local resident of some renown. At first his interest in Katya seems harmless, innocent; Katya's interest in him seems precociously manipulative. His beautiful oceanside home, the children's books he has written, his classical music, his lavish present to her - Kidder's life contrasts starkly with Katya's working-class, marginally criminal family background. By degrees, almost imperceptibly, the relationship between Katya and Marcus Kidder changes, and posing for him isn't the romantic endeavor it had seemed. What does this mysterious rich man really want from Katya, who is young enough to be his granddaughter? And what will he risk to get it?

Not AR rated