Working door-to-door one day, trying to eke money out of folk with even less of it than he has, Dolly crosses paths with a beautiful young woman named Mona Farrell. Mona's being forced by her aunt to do things she doesn't like, with men she doesn't know -- she wants out, any way she can get it. And to a man who wants nothing of what he has, Mona sure looks like something he actually does. Soon Dolly and Mona find themselves involved in a scheme of robbery, murder and mayhem that makes Dolly's blood run cold. As Dolly's plans begin to unravel, his mind soon follows. In A Hell of a Woman, Jim Thompson offers another arresting portrait of a deviant mind, in an ambitious crime novel that ranks among his best work.

    He had the morals of a tomcat and the instincts of a rattlesnake. But Ferron was sitting pretty. In New York City he had Lydia —a gorgeous redhead who loved him to distraction. Upstate he had Amy—lovely, virginal and wealthy; she could hardly wait till they were married. In the trunk of his battered car he had one hundred thousand dollars.—And he had literally gotten away with murder! Ferron was very lucky. Then his world started to come apart at the seams with shattering suddenness ...

    and hungry and cheap and demanding. But it didn't matter. She was all those things, and I knew it, but she was much more, too. She was fire and ice and fury, and when she came up to me—that first time—her mouth making little squirming noises, I knew she was all I ever wanted. I was a cop. An honest one. Tough, but honest. And she was the wife of another man. Maybe she was a killer. Maybe she was a--a kind of person even tough cops don't talk about except in dirty whispers. But I didn't care. I had to have her.