While the rest of America is driving shiny new Chevrolets to the suburbs and reaping the rewards of the G.I. Bill, in Hell's Kitchen it's business as usual for Josephine Flannigan. Joe is still pinching jewelry from Tiffany's, still living in a furnished room rented by the week - still free (but just barely so) of the worst aspects of a life that nearly destroyed her. She's been clean for two years, but hard years they've been.Now, though, things seem to be taking a turn for the better. Joe's been offered $1,000 by a nice suburban couple whose daughter, a Barnard student, has disappeared into the seedy underbelly of New York - a world Joe knows like the back of her hand. Easy money, she thinks.But Josephine's quick payday takes her back into the streets she thought she'd left behind, a journey that becomes more vertiginous at every turn - a harrowing descent into deceit and manipulation that makes it impossible to distinguish friend from foe, and leads her to a choice that will haunt her to the end of her days. Read Less