Jailbait

Josie Dobbs, 16-year-old honor studen and head cheerleader, is everybody's angel - and a devil in disguise. In one fateful moment on her front porch, Josie rips from police chief Jim Otis his precarious grip on career, future - his whole life. Otis, a defrocked Chicago police detective whose foolish romance with an underage hooker landed him in little Hercules, Wisconsin, has no defense against Josie's wiles. Rejected by voters, he's a lame-duck chief when a heist at the Hercules...
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Josie Dobbs, 16-year-old honor studen and head cheerleader, is everybody's angel - and a devil in disguise. In one fateful moment on her front porch, Josie rips from police chief Jim Otis his precarious grip on career, future - his whole life. Otis, a defrocked Chicago police detective whose foolish romance with an underage hooker landed him in little Hercules, Wisconsin, has no defense against Josie's wiles. Rejected by voters, he's a lame-duck chief when a heist at the Hercules Hardware almost kills one of of Otis' only friends. Suddenly, he has a month, before he leaves office, to solve the biggest crime in Hercules' history. He's too proud to let it slide.Otis' dilemma gets worse when Scott McKinney, a Hercules High School ne'er-do-well who turned his life around in the Marines, comes home to visit his mom and gets fingered for the heist.To save McKinney from a frame-up, Otis has to wade into a swamp of sordid trysts and local rumor-mongers, sorting lies from truth from plain old ugly innuendo.As the investigation ventures beyond Hercules, Chief Otis circles back to his nemesis, the irresistible, irreproachable, irrepressible Josie Dobbs. Josie's power over the town is her brilliance and beauty. Her sexual dominion over boys - and men twice her age - is a secret no man dares reveal because she is, after all, jailbait. Her secrets are safe as long as Hercules worships her, and the men in her life cower in silent fear. She leaves behind a trail of regret and tragedy that disappears as quickly as she can flash her perfect smile and cast her spell. Otis battles his public shame and his private demons - and even gets a little help from his friends- as he finally figures out what really happened, and what Josie did, at Hercules Hardware on that cold night in November.One last horror reminds Jim Otis, too late, of a timeless truth: The cover-up is always worse than the crime.