Book excerpt: Socially awkward Charlotte-Louise Andrews, fifteen and naive, is the only child of a single mother who puts booze before her daughter. Desperate for acceptance, Charlotte-Louise latches on to an unruly, street smart teen who guides her through various sordid inner city adventures, and later introduces her to Joaquin Lomax. Sharp minded, twenty-year-old Joaquin seduces the emotionally scarred Charlotte-Louise with attention, gifts, his good looks and nice guy exterior. Charlotte-Louise is in over her head before she realizes she's hooked up with a brutal, ingenious drug dealer. In this startling three-year account of Charlotte-Louise's life, wrapped in a candid Blatino family saga, she becomes helplessly entangled in Joaquin's fast, illicit world - a world of sex, crime, and deception ... until she turns the tables.