Book review: Strip clubs, drugs love

Title:The Spirit WithinAuthor:Chauline HansleReviewer:Barbara Nelson

This is a fairly interesting story built around Susan Shields, a coco-brown Jamaican girl with humble beginnings, who is determined to become a lawyer. In order to reach her goal, she migrates to Miami and enrols at Florida Memorial University in Miami Gardens.

Her father had deserted the family when the children were very young. Her mother, however, helps her to follow her dream. She uses all her savings to pay for Susan's tuition and a friend offers her room and board in Miami for the first six months.

In order to help herself financially Susan works as a dancer at a strip club, the Diamante Club. There, she meets and befriends Brenda, a woman with a lurid and disturbing past.

Susan is an attractive young woman and comes to the attention of young Professor Andrew Wyans. He was born in New York, but decided after practicing law for some time to teach at the university in Miami Gardens.

risky love

Although he knows it is against the rules to date one of his students, Wyans throws caution to the wind and becomes involved with Susan.

As the story develops, other characters are introduced including some unsavoury types that are involved in drug dealing and extortion; Susan and Brenda become close friends, and love develops between the professor and his student.

But the story is not all a bed of roses. Wyans finds out, that Susan dances at a strip club and that throws a wrench in the blossoming love affair.

Later in the story, the awful truth about Brenda's past seeps out, and this casts some dark shadows on the developing relationship between Wyans and Susan.

But it all comes together in the end, that is, after a few dead bodies are discovered in abandoned buildings, the Diamante Club mysteriously burns to the ground and Brenda does something very unexpected.

Susan gets Andrew's love and her law degree with a few nice things - like a mansion on the beach, and a yacht thrown in for good measure.