Love and Betrayal

Love and violence thrive in the glamorous diplomatic worlds of Washington, Rio de Janeiro and the Texas oil fields in this latest suspenseful novel from Muriel Maddox that opens in Midland, Texas in the summer of 1949. Midland is a booming oil town, thrust up from the West Texas prairie. Virile young men have flocked out from the East after the Second World War with adventure and the desire for a quick fortune in their veins. "Yalies" they're called by the Texans and Peter Spaulding is one of them. Twenty-eight, handsome, attractive to women, yet moody and unhappy much of the time, he has broken away from his socialite family and needs to achieve success on his own. But fate will intervene. How is he to know--on that day, the seventh of July--that tragedy lies ahead? "Love and Betrayal" strips off the tissue-thin covering of human nature and reveals the web of relationships and secrets that lie just beneath the surface of people's lives, hidden from others ... and often even from themselves.