The Keys to Tulsa — Brian Fair Berkey

It's an oil-fueled sprawl of a boomtown, where the Prayer Tower and the Sixty-Six Club ("girls-girls-girls") compete for pride of place. It's the moral frontier of Reagan's America -- and Richter Boudreau's hometown.

There's scandal in Richter Boudreau's family, and he doesn't shy away from trouble himself. He was born on the right side of the tracks, but now -- a few years and wrong turns later -- defeat clings to him like cheap perfume. His jobs as a newspaper movie reviewer and a college film professor don't begin to cover his obligations. And there's not much credit in his unwritten screenplay or his unhealthy infatuation with his old flame Vicky Stover. So when Vicky's husband -- a man born wearing Roy Orbison shades and a ducktail hairdo -- proposes the deal, Boudreau's only too willing to listen. Stover knows a topless dancer who's seen too much, and somebody who'll pay for her silence. Soon Boudreau's dodging the police and at least one killer, in a town where there are few places to run and no place to hide. Caught between evangelical wrath on one hand and imperial Tulsa fortunes on the other, with a lifetime of regret behind him, Boudreau can meet his destiny only by throwing himself into it....