<p><font face="Verdana">The waitress Glade Spencer--white-blond hair， perfect skin， just twenty-two years old--drifts innocent and waiflike through life， thus far avoiding harm to herself . . . Barker Dodds， hoping to shed his hard-man reputation， has fled his native Plymouth for a fresh start in London. &lt;br&gt;There， 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 all the potential of becoming the soft drink of the twenty-first century.&lt;br&gt;Once this highly confidential strategy develops unforeseen complications， Barker is paid a visit by &lt;br&gt;a friend from the old life， and soon is presented &lt;br&gt;with an unthinkable dilemma. And the person with whom he now shares a destiny--unbeknownst to her--is Glade.??&lt;br&gt;Rupert Thomson， author of The Insult (&quot;A psychological thriller that has just about everything&quot; &lt;br&gt;--Cleveland Plain Dealer)， here explores the price of ambition， the difficulty of change or escape， and &lt;br&gt;the needs that drive us or that we ourselves create; and in Soft! he again transforms the conventions &lt;br&gt;of noir--whether contract-killing or romance or the classic double-cross--into fiction that is remarkably contemporary and strange.</font></p>