MY JULIET

Sonny LaMott is a struggling painter in New Orleans, still obsessed with his high school sweetheart, a princess of the French Creole aristocracy who left him to go to Hollywood. Fifteen years later, in 1986, a much-changed Juliet Beauvais comes home to inherit the family mansion from (what she hopes is) a dying mother. Not surprisingly, Sonny is drawn into Juliet's greedy scheme even as his romantic memories take a beating, but Bradley's knockout fifth novel goes darker, and deeper, than the old story of a guy played for a sucker by a femme fatale. The acclaimed author of Tupelo Nights and Smoke welds pieces of stock melodrama -- greed, lust, love, family secrets -- into a darkly powerful noir thriller dominated by the alluring, troubled Juliet, whose decline into pornography and drugs is both heartbreaking and revolting. A-