DARK RIDE

Boy meets girl, boy and girl take turns handcuffing each other to bed, boy and girl plot to kill girl's husband in this sex-soaked noir debut. Once Jimmy Rogers was the golden boy of Clarksville, Calif., getting into scrapes his father, the mayor, had to call in favors to pull him out of. Now, after his gilded youth has ended in a rash of failures and disappointments—the final blow his disinheritance by his father—Eve Stack, his boss's wife, is all the has-been insurance agent can think about, even when he's making love to somebody else. After a few months of marathon crank-and-couplings in Eve's discreet dungeon, Jimmy can't think of anything but hard sex and big money. It's the perfect time for him to resist the apple-cheeked allure of Kelly Owens, the new face at Phil Stack's agency, and agree to Eve's plan to dispose of her wealthy, inconvenient husband. Jimmy could never have predicted the horrific way the killing goes awry. But he certainly should've seen what would happen next, if not the exact steps in his path to perdition. Phil's brother Nigel turns up out of the blue and sinks serious teeth into both Jimmy and Eve, who's all too comfortable with being a new man's sex slave and confidential informer. Jimmy's got to get rid of Nigel too, of course, but not until he's finished jumping through every nasty hoop Nigel's forced on him. Harrington's distinctive spin on this familiar tale, apart from liberal doses of truly dangerous sex, is to allow Jimmy's civic connections—the D.A. and the sheriff are boyhood friends who know how to show respect to the mayor's legacy—to keep pulling him back from the edge of disaster, even as they keep reminding him that ``killing Phil had really been just one more misstep in a long line of missteps.'' The grisly, deadpan, unnervingly comic tone makes you wonder if Jim Thompson hasn't risen from the grave.