Word: conning
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...talk themselves in and out of some fairly deadly predicaments. The better half of her new novel, Lily White (HarperCollins; 460 pages; $25), carries on cheerfully with this agreeable storytelling. The main character, Lily White, is a 45-year-old defense attorney whose new client is a gifted con man. He's a tall, awkward fellow who seems too clumsy to be slick, but his specialty is romancing rich, lonely, middle-aged women, and he is very good at it. Alas, however, his latest conquest has been found dead, with the marks of large hands on her throat...
...safe house--"far away from Jack"--where she is describing their marriage as short on love and long on intimidation. "He would beat me, threaten me, put a knife to my neck," says Jackson. "I was afraid if I left him he would kill me." Jackson wed the ex-con in 1989 and plunged into a string of profitable but cheapening enterprises, including launching a psychic hotline and posing for Playboy. "He controlled all my bank accounts," Jackson says. "I couldn't cash a check." She says she called it quits when Gordon insisted that she perform in a porno...
...intimately familiar with both states of mind, as I have been a waffler and a fence-sitter on this issue for most of my life. I have been pro and con and both "with exceptions." But in the last couple of years I have come to a temporary conclusion: while vengeance is applicable to a discussion on capital punishment, empathy is not. When faced with a John Royster, the desire for vengeance is almost a given, while empathy is misplaced. If you are a decent person, you could never be in his situation; you will never walk that walk. There...
...ROCK (June 7). Connery, visible this time and wearing his full toupee, is a hermit con who helps hip-geeky Nicolas Cage storm Alcatraz to prevent some bad guys from doing really bad things. The trailer makes it look like another exercise in chatty machismo from the Simpson-Bruckheimer team (Crimson Tide...
Last Dance (written by Ron Koslow and Steven Haft) is also akin to Dead Man Walking, with Stone as the grizzled con and Rob Morrow in the Sister Helen Prejean role. Cindy Liggett has spent 12 years on death row for a double murder she committed while on drugs; hope, for her, is the one hallucinogen not worth tasting. But Rick Hayes, a lawyer from the state clemency board, becomes convinced that her case has merit--and falls a little in love with her. Why not? This wretched killer is, after all, Sharon Stone...