Budge: A Novel

Louella Debra Poule is doing an eighteen-month stint on a weapons charge at a minimum-security institution up the Fraser Valley. Her drug-dealing, sometime-boyfriend Jimmy Flood and his sidekick, Blacky Harbottle, should have taken the rap, but their list of priors would have put them in the slammer for quite a little stay. Louella 'did the right thing' and took the fall.

Six months into Louella's sentence, her mother, whom she hasn't seen in years, dies suddenly. After Louella's early release, she discovers she has inherited a fair bit of money and a nice condo in a treed and quiet suburb of Vancouver. It is here that Louella sits in relative safety and obscurity, here that she decides to take some time away from the influence of her prior associates, reassess her life, tend her mother's garden, and work through the agonizing steps from addiction back to the world of 'normal' living.

But, needless to say, her past comes a-callin...