"At her cousin's wedding, Jean Duprez, an advertising-agency art director who specializes in effective but unsettling concepts for her clients, meets a handsome stranger named Steven Cain. What follows is the story of a relationship so ominous and puzzling that the reader is drawn into the author's designs as inevitably, and as helplessly, as Jean is drawn to Steven.

She seeks him out although he often seems indifferent to her, she disregards his disturbing personal history, and she tells him about her own transgressions. And so it becomes intriguingly hard to say whether she is a possible victim of evil or has deliberately put herself in harm's way. The story also dramatizes the intricacies of collecting, particularly the wary bargaining between seller and buyer. In Paul Griner's hands, this dance of flea-market negotiation comes to seem nearly as sinister as the increasingly dark encounters between Jean and Steven.

One is a matter of guile and folly, the other of life and death."--BOOK JACKET.