Shattered Souls: Zane Presents

In this 2001 self-published title, picked up Strebor's ""Zane Presents"" series, four college friends uneasily forge adult lives: Britton has ditched a job as a school psychologist for a life of leisure in the Dominican Republic; Indera, or Indy, is a ""mack diva"" who runs a successful beauty salon and takes up with whomever she likes, but considers most men unreliable at best. Damascus, aka Tee, strips for a living, and has no problem hooking up with club-going women. Chyna, the good girl, is married, rockily, with children. Childhood traumas-a variety of sexual and emotional abuses and terrors-are close to the surface of the adult lives of Birch's four survivors, and when pasts and presents collide, the results are fierce melodrama. Snappy dialogue, trash talk (from Tee) and steamy sex keep the proceedings moving as the four, each in his or her own way, attempt to hold it together.