BEN HAAS CHECKLIST
Haas – writing as William Kane (and William King)
BEDSIDE
HOUSEWIFE CALL-GIRL – Bedside 1213, 1962. (All Kanes are
PBOs.) Cover art by Harold W. McCauley.
Can’t tell if this book or a
1962 Nightstand called FLESH ADDICT was the first William Kane novel. The
second Kane Nightstand is dated 1963, so it’s a safe bet that one of these two
early Kanes was his “try out” for this publisher. HOUSEWIFE CALL-GIRL reads like one of Ben’s
Beacons. Marion Fiske is unhappy with life in
Hazen
City
and unhappy with her husband
Dale (the book begins “He was putting his hands on her again, and she did not
like it.”)
Marion
takes her
friend Fran’s advice and joins her at work as an afternoon call girl for
Walter Marlon. Before she can blink she has been “bought” by lesbian movie
star Regina Holiday for a four-day sex and drugs binge. What will Dale do?
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STRUMPET by William King – EB903, 1963.
“From well-bred virgin to
well-bedded harlot” - Dr. Joyce Sloane, Ph. D. leaves her respectable
academic life behind and travels to the sleaziest strip of a sinful city in
search of her lost twin Gloria, who is working as a stripper at the Black Cat
Club. Sex and violence ensue. Many of the same themes are explored in a later
William Kane book called RED LIGHT SISTERS.
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PASSION ROAD
by William King – EB918, nd (1963).
When Donna Stafford learns her
husband is having an affair, she runs away, first to the bohemian lifestyle
of
Greenwich Village
, then on the road, with each stop
more degrading. This is a dark story with mutilations and murders and Donna’s
horrible end is nightmarish. If asked to guess, I’d say that the publisher
assigned a book by one of the other writers to “William King” for this horror
show.
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SHAME CIRCLE – EB947, 1964.
Millionaire Oklahoma oilman Dan
Keller has everything he wants, except Kitty, who left him to marry Dell
Anders, an Air Force colonel at a base in the Southwest. But one day Kitty calls Dan and tells him
Dell has disappeared. Dan’s search for Dell leads into some very kinky situations
(including a chapter with a “titanic-breasted” lesbian that has no connection
with anything else in the book), and into Kitty’s bed, and on to a gambling
club where the grand prize each night is a naked woman.
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THE SEDUCER – EB950, 1964.
Troy Garfield is “the seducer”,
a man who lives traveling from woman to woman. But when
Troy
goes after the wife of tough logging crew boss Town Braddock, things go badly
at a mountain cabin when a forest fire erupts.
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MENAGE A TROIS – EL308, 1965. Cover art by Robert Bonfils.
Rich and jaded Ken Wilkins and
his wife Patricia evolve from a couple into a threesome when twisted little
Sara Blaine comes to work for them as a maid.
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IN WARM DESIRE – EL351, 1966. Cover artist: Robert
Bonfils.
In a sexbook version of IN COLD
BLOOD, two psychopathic rapists named Rube and Charlie wreak havoc on
innocent Midwestern families, but when captured they escape from the mental
hospital and kidnap their psychiatrist, Don Denning. They end up at Don’s house, where Don’s
wife is “entertaining” her friends.
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TURN ME ON – EL366, 1967. Unknown artist.
Honey-blonde innocent young Connie Moran has her hands full with her cruise ship cabin mate Kay Kingston. Then wicked Kay takes her to Jasmine Island to teach her all about sexual slavery. But the natives are restless…
More reminiscent of EMMANUELLE or THE STORY OF O than anything else by Ben Haas, this 1967 Kane feels like the work of a different author with a different agenda.
“She pushed her loins against him, tantalized his hardness with her softness.” |
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BEYOND ALL SHAME - EL374, 1967.
Cover by Bonfils. Thanks to Grant Thiessen |
EVENING READER
FLESH WEB – ER730, 1964. Cover by Bonfils.
Traveling salesman Don Rossman
of Workhorse Equipment parties heavily an a convention, little knowing his
wife Ruth is back home being blackmailed and seduced by wicked neighbors. Don
hits the road and meets all kinds of farmer’s daughters.
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PASSION PRIESTESS – ER738, 1964.
Cover art by Robert Bonfils.
Told in a first person style
that is unlike any other book on this checklist, PASSION PRIESTESS details
the adventures of Les & Fran discovering voodoo on the
Caribbean
island
of
Pandamo
.
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SIN WED – ER745, 1964. Cover art by Robert Bonfils.
Down on his luck and broke,
Lloyd Travis is sitting on a park bench when a lady named Elizabeth Brant
comes along with a proposition. It’s a proposal actually; she needs Lloyd to
marry her. When she takes him home to the Brant mansion, Lloyd finds out
she’s caught in a nasty trap arranged by her evil brother Howard, who runs
the town.
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RED LIGHT SISTERS – ER1257, 1966. Cover art by Tomas
Cannizarro.
Rich and famous movie star
Jennifer Marsh has it all, including a hidden past. She gets a letter from
her kid sister Priss from a sin town called Deltaville. Caught in the red
light district, Priss needs her help. Jenny uses clothes and make-up to disguise
herself as a Deltaville tramp, and she descends into the hellish town, where
Priss is working in a live sex show controlled by dangerous pimps and crime lords.
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IDLE HOUR
SWITCH CLUB – IH426, 1964. Bonfils cover.
Jim and Judith Fanning live in
the Shady Hills area of Craighead (two place names familiar to residents of
Ben’s home town, Charlotte NC). When Judith is attacked walking home at night
from a pool party, Jim enlists his friend Carl Crippen, a policeman, to hunt
down the attacker. Undercover private detectives Brad Fennimore and Dot
Jennings are brought in to pose as a married couple in the neighborhood. And
what they find is a wife-swapping club.
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SINERAMA – IH471, 1965.
Writer Matt Dennison is out
walking on the
California
coast
one morning when he rescues a beautiful suicidal blonde from the surf. She
turns out to be Jeri Cochran, the famous movie star. Jeri has been reduced to
making porn movies for an evil producer named Shofar. Matt infiltrates
Shofar’s “illicit movie colony”, where his plans get waylaid when he falls in
love with one of the porn actresses, a comely brunette named Marti Valance.
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LEISURE BOOK
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SIN MIXERS – LB612, 1963. Cover
art by Bonfils.
Doris and Charlie Lord are
bored, affluent middle-class middle Americans. They decide to spice up their
dull lives with some wife swapping. This is never a good idea for the
sinswept characters in these books.
Cover artist Robert Bonfils has
quite an eye for composition, and the cover of SIN MIXERS avoids all the
things its male readers have no interest in, like seeing men in their
underwear. The men are just virile hands and forearms reaching into the
frame. Our eyes are drawn to the flashy and colorful women.
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SEXPLOSION – LB617, 1963.
The sleepy “Southwestern” town of
Hollyville
is disrupted when two
women arrive and move into Miss Betsy’s Rooming House. One of them is a
sexpot with gentian-blue eyes named Christa; the other is the new librarian
Laurie, who shocks the town by stocking the library with modern fiction. The
local hooded “Vigilante Society” reacts, and soon the whole town bursts open.
There are a lot of repressed souls in Hollyville, but oh, that Miss Betsy!
A memorable line from
SEXPLOSION: “She had all the modesty of a chimpanzee.”
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SIN HOOKED – LB644, 1964. Small
format, pink spine. Cover art by Robert Bonfils.
Traveling salesman Doyle Trevor
is happily married to Donna, free at last to forget his roaming first wife
Annalee, who had died in a fiery car crash. When Doyle travels to a different
city on business, a man named Pangloss takes him to a live sex show. Doyle is
shocked to find Annalee starring in the show; it had not been her in the
burned car. Now with two wives, Doyle sets Annalee up in a home of her own.
But wildcat Annalee won’t settle down, she goes out to a fateful orgy. The basic outline is very similar to the
Ken Barry Beacon THE BIGAMIST.
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THE TRYSTING PLACE – LB1141, 1966. Bonfils cover.
Some of the original authors
were gone when the publisher switched to these taller paperbacks with white
spines and colorful Robert Bonfils cover art. For example, none of the Andrew
Shaws in this format are by the original Shaw, Lawrence Block. But on the
Clyde Allison and Don Elliott books, it is obviously the work of the same
authors of the early small-format books. Like Allison and Elliott and others,
some of the William Kane books appear to be written by the same writer of the
first Kanes. For example, THE TRYSTING PLACE takes place at Danny’s Place in
Hazen
City
, the same setting for four early
Kane titles from 1962.
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SHE HAD TO CHEAT – LB1146, 1966.
Cover art by Robert Bonfils.
Returning to a theme explored
in STRUMPET and RED LIGHT SISTERS, SHE HAD TO CHEAT is about two twin-like
women named Carol and Claudia. Claudia is frigid prude, the flip side of the
coin Carol is a nympho. Claudia’s husband Eric finally goes to other women
for comfort. Claudia and Carol seem so alike because they are the same person;
she has split her personality in two. And Carol has to cheat.
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SIN-DEEP LOVER – LB1186, 1967. Transvestite cover art by
Robert Bonfils.
It’s never believable for a
second, but the author asks us to accept the idea that this blonde science
major on the cover is so sexy and so beautiful she can’t get a job as a
scientist, or as a model. She is forced to pose for sleazy photographs. She
falls in love with the photographer and, willing to do anything to advance
his wish to become a photojournalist, agrees to secretly sleep with a
big-time newsmagazine publisher to get her boyfriend a job. When the
publisher takes her to his bed, he has a surprise for her. He’s a
transvestite. Cover artist Robert Bonfils captures that moment from the book:
“weirdo and wanton”.
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MIDNIGHT READER
BOOMTOWN SINNERS – MR425, 1962. Cover art by Harold
McCauley.
On the run from the
St.
Louis
syndicate, Beth Calder moves to Roaring Horse,
a
Rocky
Mountain
boomtown with 1500 men and nine dance hall girls. Those odds look good to
Beth. But then the syndicate hit man comes to town.
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SEXECUTIVE – MR443, 1962. Cover by McCauley.
Charles Wayne works for Missile
Components in
Hazen
City
.
His job is to line up the booze and women for the wild parties thrown to win
fat government contracts. But the parties get out of hand.
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LUST LOTTERY – MR453, 1962.
Like SEXECUTIVE, LUST LOTTERY
takes place at Missile Components in
Hazen
City
. Two employees, April Gentry
and Ros Cole, come up with a sure-fire scheme guaranteed to make money. On
every payday, the workers put a couple dollars into a lottery and a lucky
winner is drawn. That winner then gets a weekend with April or Ros. Seems
like a great moneymaker, but April starts falling in love with her foreman,
Curt Walker. And then the lottery is won by April’s living nightmare, a
brutal gorilla of a man named Vito Bonnelli.
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FLESH FIX – MR480, 1963.
Corrupt Governor Clell Fenton
is turning his state government into a pit of degradation. Newspaperman Perry
Morgan plans to expose the racket, but instead he is lured into the sin game
by Fenton’s evil assistant Anne Weatherford, who gets her kicks whipping
younger women. Perry is assigned to watch the Governor’s ex-wife Libby.
Violence and death soon follow.
Clell strikes me as a rather
odd name, but it is also a name in Ben Elliott’s CONTRACT IN CARTRIDGES.
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LUST WEB – MR484, 1963.
Diabolical Communist spy John
Orloff unleashes his human lust bomb Grace Cromwell on the unsuspecting
scientists working on the Omega-3 at Shelton Missile and Guidance Company,
using “the most potent tool at the command of the spy – sex”. Grace is
trained in the arts of seduction – and lesbian love!
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LUST LASHED – MR490, 1963.
Not all 1963 Midnight Readers
depict women being whipped on their covers, just the ones by William Kane.
She was Chris Carse, owner of
Carse
Castle
on the
California
coast, built by her father, the famous newspaper-chain owner. He had taught his daughter to be tougher
and harder than any man. Chris makes sex puppets out of the weak-willed
people she meets, and a writer named Mark Rutledge becomes the latest victim
of her whip. But when they are stranded by a plane crash in the Alaskan
wilderness, Mark becomes the master and Chris the willing slave.
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FLESH ADDICT – NB1613, 1962. Cover art by McCauley.
All prim and proper, Dorian Kay
arrives at State to begin college, but nothing has prepared her for the world
of her oversexed roomie Lucia Denton. Lucia is working on a sexuality project
for Professor Vertrees, who plans to become the
next
Dr
Kinsey. Lucia and new project recruit Dorian
are required to look at a lot of porn, and everybody knows what looking at
porn does to an innocent young lady like Dorian. She becomes a sex addict! The
project spirals so wildly out of control that finally people start getting
killed. At the end of the book, one character who has survived has moved, he
is “doing clinical and social work in another state in a large town called
Hazen
City
”. Possibly William Kane’s first book.
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SIN CITY SLAVES – NB1650, 1963.
Three soldiers on leave at
Fort
Channing
(Benning) make
life-altering choices in the
Sin
City
across the river. Unexpected emotional pull and character development for a
Nightstand. Sample sentence: “Payne walked through shatteringly bright
sunlight, faced with a yawning eternity of time, full of a chaotic aimless
restlessness.”
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HAMILTON
’S
HAREM – NB1756, 1965.
Lawyer Gage Hamilton of
Crescentville agrees to help his client Allen Fernol with his wild wife
Melissa and their three stunning, out of control blonde daughters. But when
Fernol is murdered,
Hamilton
suddenly has a “harem” on his hands that would drive anybody crazy.
Especially his girlfriend Greta.
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THE PRUDE – NB1787, 1966.
Conrad Blane writes hardboiled
detective novels about a super-tough private eye named Grant Sledge (as in
Sledge Hammer), who is described as
“a brute, an animal, a sadist”. The books are very successful. Too
successful, really, for Grant Sledge is slowly taking over the mind of his weaker
alter ego Conrad Blane.
(Nightstand experimented with
books with no cover paintings for a short time in 1966.)
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PROGRAMMED TO LOVE – NB1801, 1966. Cover by Cannizarro.
On the surface, it looks like
Jim Cardin has it all – his brilliant, rich and beautiful wife Betsy, a home
in Fletcher City in the Midwest, and a great job at the computer programming
department at AWP (Automated Work Planning). But when Jim’s job takes him to Hudsonia Mills, things get strange. Is
it boredom or decadence that drags Jim and Betsy down? Or are those words synonymous?
“Machines (computers) are the wave of the
future, people are obsolete.”
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SINNING SIMON – NB1816, 1966.
Repressed librarian Vickie Donovan
collides with sexual predator Simon King.
Simon comes into her library in
Cantonville and asks for a copy of CANDY. She refers him to the local drug
store for “such trash”. He seduces her by pretending to be mystery writer
Jefferson Trentwell, author of MURDER FOR MIDGETS and MURDER FOR MATRONS.
Simon is working his way through all the women in town when two teens get
killed drinking and driving. Their friends lie to the parents and blame Miss
Donovan - and the small-town witch hunt begins.
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DEALER IN DESIRE – NB1817, 1967. Cover by Cannizarro.
Howard Mallory is 42; he lives
in
Desmond
,
Ohio
with his wife Ellen. Howard has always been a quiet, unassuming sort, but, he
tells us “each man dreams of a lovely, well-bred nympho-maniac who will stop
at nothing.” And that’s how he views their neighbor, Lita Roland. Lita is a
handful, but when Lita’s Lolita–type daughter Christie advises Howard she
prefers much older men, Howard now has both hands full.
DEALER IN DESIRE is narrated by
three different characters who take turns telling us this story.
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FLESH RAID – NB1826, 1967. Cover by Bonfils.
Laird Steel, top traveling
salesman for Follett Foundries, lives in
Greene
City
with his wife Chris. When
Laird gets arrested on the road in a motel room with a hooker, Chris leaves
him. Laird and Chris both embark on new sexual experiences, but that gun on
the cover does not show up until the last chapter.
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PILLAR BOOK
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SEX
SEA
by William King – PB804, 1963.
Cover by Bonfils.
Beachcomber Rod Carlson (“the
only white man for miles”) is taking life easy of the island of Bora-ka, part
of the Bora-Maka atoll, “until one day an orgy-laden yacht drenched (the
natives) with blood love!”
Things are getting crazy for
Rod when a typhoon hits.
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JOY JOB by William King – PB811, 1963. Cover by Bonfils.
As
SEX
SEA
is about sinners on a Pacific
isle climaxing with a typhoon, JOY JOB is about sinners on one of those
barrier islands off the
Georgia
coast, climaxing in a hurricane. Tom Craighead finds work as a procurer for
Barton Knapp, one of the richest men in the world. Knapp turns out to have a
torture chamber, and he wants every woman who ventures into his house,
including Tom’s wife Jill. So he
hypnotizes her and that (of course) turns her into a nymphomaniac.
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THE DEPRAVED ONE – PB822, nd (1964). Cover art by Robert Bonfils.
Pillar Books are nominally
“sex” books, except I don’t find them to have any interest in sex. They are
instead all about depravity. Ex-Army Major Walker Flint, now a mercenary
somewhere in
Central America
, tells this story in
first person. Both the title page and a list of Pillar Books inside give the
title correctly – it’s THE DEPRAVED ONES.
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PASSION LIMBO – PB826, nd (1964), Cover art by Robert
Bonfils.
Mild-mannered bank president
Russell Fletcher wakes up one morning to realize he has been suffering from
amnesia, and during that time he has built a new life as the slum lord of a
part of town people call East Hell. And a man with a gun who wants to be the
new slum king is coming for him.
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PASSION WEB – PB830, nd (1964). Cover by Bonfils.
Lois Frost is an industrial
spy. She works for Nationwide Oil. Lois is sent out West to seduce a virile
geologist named Kirk Parsons, who knows where a rival oil company holds
secret oil reserves. But Lois runs into Clint Sandifer, who dresses like a cowboy and wields
a big whip.
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SUNDOWN READER
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LUST TREASURES – SR513, 1964.
Modern-day soldier of fortune
Len Wolfe (who identifies himself as a lone wolf in the first chapter for any
readers not paying attention) takes on a job from an American fruit company to
carry a fortune in silver to buy off a bandit called “El Presidente” running a Central American banana
republic. Wolfe arrives as a
revolution breaks out. The situation begins to get dicey when Wolfe falls for
El Presidente’s mistress.
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SINNERS NEST – SR571, 1965. Cover art by Darrell Millsap.
Perry Quentin from
Kenton
Heights
has invented a new photo
emulsion destined to make a fortune for his employer, Fotochem. On a business
trip to
London
, he meets a
stripper named Lora, marries her and brings her home to
America
.
Six weeks later, industry spy Liz Webber wants that new emulsion for her
rival company, and sets her wicked sights on Perry. Liz enlists Perry’s
neighbor Randy Britton to get Lora out of the way by seducing her. Lora
meanwhile has come to realize just why she liked stripping – she’s an
exhibitionist.
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FLESH FRUG – SR574, 1965. Cover art by Darrell Millsap.
Poston, a promoter who can sell
anything, takes a job revitalizing a dying fishing village on the
Pacific
Coast
. His employers are three
sex-crazed sisters who use their considerable skills to entice him into
taking the impossible job. He envisions a new resort with a folk music
festival where all the college kids will want to come for Spring Break,
pouring money into the town’s cash registers. When thousands and thousands of
red-blooded American kids show up for the music festival, the whole town goes
wild. William Kane has predicted
Woodstock
four years before it happened.
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ORGY STORM – SR584, 1965.
A hurricane is headed for the
Atlantic coast fishing village of Clydeburn, where pop art master Caddo
Wallace, lobsterman Eben Blaine and voyeur playboy Garth Connor have more
women worked up than they can shake a stick at. Connor’s lost love Rena arrives in town, like
a hurricane. Eben’s lover Rose has
those “gentian-blue eyes” like Christa in SEXPLOSION.
“Evil does live
in the world, doesn’t it?”
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SIN SAFARI – SR588, 1966. Cover art by Darrell Millsap.
Great white hunter Peter Kenton
is on safari in
Africa
with nympho sex goddess Barbara
Vail’s party and his trusty native gun bearer, Kuroso. Kuroso however has a
secret agenda. He is leading them to the village of the Kinoros, a renegade
army of raping-and-slaughtering natives planning to wreak havoc. This plan is
short-circuited when Barbara Vail, having drained every man on the safari,
takes on the entire Kinoro village in one night, exhausting them all and
calling for more.
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QUEEN OF TARTS – SR620, 1966.
There’s a new District Attorney
cleaning up the town. His wife Teddie didn’t want him to take the job,
because she has been keeping a little secret from Bill. She’s running the
town’s call-girl operation out of the back of her lingerie shop. Things start
to boil when a sadistic hit man is hired to take out the new D.A.
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SEXODUS – SR624, 1966.
Jud Gordon has come home from
Vietnam
and taken a boring job at his father’s bank in
Tindall
City
. Life turns exciting for Jud
when a gorgeous woman named Norma Dance comes in for a loan. Jud is in love,
not realizing that Norma needs a sucker on the inside for the bank heist she has
planned. Jud knows Norma is a wild one when he sees a whole shelf of Olympia
Press books in her apartment. And he knows what Norma is: “the wildest, most depraved woman I ever met
in my life.”
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Lynn Munroe Books
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