The Gentlemen’s Club

She is a graduate student at the University of Michigan, a gifted athlete with a generous outgoing nature and fashion model looks the kind of perfection easy to hate. But no one does. On a chilled spring night when she might otherwise labor over her thesis or polish an impressive resume, she grips a gun in her hand, and wonders how it came to this. When the sun rises on a new day, a man is dead, and she is gone. Eighteen months later, she surfaces in Detroit with a new name, new look, and a new life. No longer the All-American girl, we meet Annie Tremaine in a hotel bar where her practiced skills target philandering men looking for love in all the wrong places. Mike Springer has his own troubles. A disenchanted TV news reporter, he is challenged to deliver a blockbuster story or lose his job. When he happens to see the seductive con artist at work, he plots to use her to save his faltering career. Like the sexy drink-spiker in the clingy blue dress, his emotional distance is a practiced skill born in the wreckage of a single night long ago. The past confronts Annie Tremaine in the form of Frank Panetta, cool and unemotional, determined to exact revenge for his brother’s murder. For him, violence serves as merely a mechanism by which he balances the books. Mike comes between this stalker and his prey making a dangerous enemy. But who is more dangerous, Frank Panetta or Annie Tremaine? When the woman vanishes, Mike is targeted by police as a suspect, and by Frank Panetta as an expendable link to the object of his revenge. As he untangles a web of secrets, Mike discovers the Gentlemen’s Club, a sordid patchwork of arrogance, lust, and murder that binds all of their lives together. The truth lies on a path of loss and betrayal, desperation and addiction, but ultimately redemption for two people seeking to satisfy their most basic human need to love and be loved.