Edge of Smoke (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781958922651)

In the Pruitt Igoe slums of St. Louis in the 1960s, a heroin-addict mother breaks her son's dolls and screams, "You are not a girl!" However, no one can convince Stephanie to live as Stephen. Her mother pimps her out to a man who rapes her and takes pictures of her as others rape her. After finding her mother brutally murdered, she is placed in Christian foster care, where they also try to convince her to accept being male. Her mother's lover is sentenced to life in prison for the murder. Famed Televangelist Pastor Ronald Dennison sets up a trust that allows a compassionate old neighbor to adopt her out of foster care. Still, she is violently bullied at school for identifying as female. The trust pays for transition surgery at eighteen, and she begins to live fully as a woman. Frightened by men, she remains a virgin until she falls in love with Jordan, but she runs into the man who abused her and remembers her childhood pledge to kill him. Will her lust for murdering the man who brutalized her as a child cause her to lose the man she loves, or will she come to her senses before it's too late?