Meanwhile, in an act of desperate inspiration, an ambitious young executive faced with a saturated market contrives a revolutionary strategy for introducing a new beverage, "Soft!," that has the potential to become the soft drink of the twenty-first century.

Once this highly confidential strategy develops unforeseen complications, Barker is contacted by a friend from the old life, and soon is presented with an unthinkable dilemma. And the person with whom he now shares a destiny -- unbeknownst to her -- is Glade.

Rupert Thomson, author of The Insult ("a psychological thriller that has just about everything" -- The Cleveland Plain Dealer), here explores the price of ambition, the difficulty of change or escape, and the needs that drive us or that we ourselves create; and in "Soft!" he again transforms the conventions of noir -- whether contract killing or romance or the classic double cross -- into fiction that is remarkably compelling.