The crime at the heart of Rancho Mirage, the murder of wealthy businessman Robert Sand at an exclusive residential country club near Palm Springs, is a study in complexity and moral ambiguity that cuts to the quick of fin de siecle America.The murder, the investigation that followed it - an investigation complicated by a bizarre series of reported rapes and abductions of the beautiful Mrs. Sand - and the eventual trial of Mrs. Sand for murder, make up one of the strangest and most telling true crime stories ever written.Andrea Claire was a single mother who had raised two boys and become a highly paid international call girl by the time she met the 68-year-old Robert Sand. Although she was portrayed as a money-hungry sociopath by the prosecuting attorney, there is considerable evidence that she was a "borderline" - and perhaps a multiple - personality: someone who, under conditions of extreme stress, can cross over into a psychotic state in which reality and fantasy, as well as right and wrong, can't be distinguished.Andrea Claire understood that her marriage to Robert Sand would not be an ordinary one, and that she would be expected to comply with his sexual demands. The extent of those demands - that she was in essence a sexual slave - turned out to be more than she had bargained for. A battered woman from the time of her first marriage at 15 to a man who had raped her, she married Sand believing she would at last achieve a secure lifestyle that would allow her to give up prostitution, a profession she had taken up because she couldn't hold a regular job.At what point does sex stop being sex and become an act of power? What happens if a man's every wish is a woman's command? Most men can understand Robert Sand; what makes him unique is that he was blessed and cursed with the resources and the will to live out his unbridled fantasies.A widower in his fifties named Joe Mims, who married Andrea Sand the day after she was indicted for murder, brings the story its strangest twist yet, and provides it with a climax that almost defies the imagination.Nothing is quite what it seems in Rancho Mirage. Read Less