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Their Wildest Dreams is the Peter Abrahams novel that nobody seems to read and that I think holds up as well as any of his crime fiction. Three women in their thirties (one of them a former childhood friend of the others, recently divorced and broke) drive into the Arizona desert on a half-planned scheme involving cash, a real-estate deal, and an old grudge that was never resolved.
Abrahams writes the slow disintegration of the trio with the kind of patience that the crime form rarely allows. The book is most interesting when it is on the friendship between the women, which keeps shifting alignment as conditions change. The criminal plot is the framework. The moral pressure is the story.
Four stars. One of the underrated heist-and-fallout novels of its decade.
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