II MAGDALEN’S third novel is loosely based on a true case of homosexual rape in a small Arkansas town. Lennie and Vance, drifters and grifters, hairdressers by avocation, lovers perhaps, employ the thirteen-year-old Benji to help out in their Salon, Hair Today (Gone Tomorrow), and slowly, systematically and fatally seduce him. Henning Forsell, who visits Sapphire, Texas, two years after the events, unravels their three life and death stories against the background of small-town America.
Magdalen’s characters—Benji’s feckless, ex-hippy mother, Mary Kay, her current lover, the disturbed Viet Nam veteran, Craig, the fat pedophile biker who calls himself “Captain” Ron, the “bouffant in hair and spirit” Ms. Pal Baldwin, the Nava County Prosecutor—will be impressed indelibly in readers’ memories.
Critics have said that Magdalen “writes like an angel”. In this case, like an avenging angel. Not for the squeamish, the book touches on some deep and troubling issues: the nature of childhood sexuality, adolescent “innocence”, violence and voyeurism. Brief, provocative, troubling.
About the Author
 I.I. Magdalen is the pseudonym Keith Botsford uses for his series of crime novels. After a notable early career as a novelist and editor, KEITH BOTSFORD describes himself as having been "sidetracked" into journalism (The Sunday Times, The Independent, La Stampa), working variously as sportswriter, food columnist and US correspondent. Half Italian and half American, born in Brussels, educated in England, he returned to writing fiction in 1989 and now lives in Boston where he is a professor of journalism, history and international relations, and edits, with Saul Bellow, The Republic of Letters.
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