Jerry Nearing is bitten by a rattlesnake and while in the hospital, his wife goes through his wallet and learns they have won a thirty-million-dollar lottery. From that point Nearing's life goes south..

The events delineated in the plot seem more than possible-they read like fact. Immediately Nearing's wife leaves him, and a major subplot is how this affects Nearing. We follow Nearing as he tries to get back a simple, normal life. This includes getting his wife back. We meet the expected con-men and hangers-on. Again these characters are more round than flat. The dialogue is direct and simple to follow.

Can a lottery winner go back to a simple life or will the money completely destroy him? We hope that Nearing will be able to reclaim his life and his wife. We sense that is what the narrator very much wants to happen.

The narrator tells us, "....a barrier existed between his poverty and wealth. It created a myth of his past which was now as fleeting and hard to prove as a lie. He tried to trace his fantasies to the other side, but dreams were impossible to imagine when they become reality with the mere tearing out of a bank check." In other words, a big part of the dream is getting there. An added bonus is the typographical layout of the book, which makes reading effortless. I may have just found another favorite author because this book deserves to be just that --in the winners circle.