“Gina Covarrubias isn’t just an excellent writer. She is an excellent person who happens, luckily, to be writing it all down.” – Lisa Carver, Drugs Are Nice: A Post-Punk Memoir

When dimwitted Delores’s older sister disappears after a RATT concert in San Francisco, she asks the Manteca Maniac—an incarcerated serial killer—to help her solve the mystery. After she becomes Mrs. Maniac, her parents throw her out of the house. Delores moves closer to the prison to focus on her marriage, where she becomes instant BFFs with Louise.

Unbeknownst to Delores, Louise has also come to this Central California town to be closer to Delores’s husband. It’s 1992, and the clock is ticking on conjugal visits for murderers in California. The Manteca Maniac is a convict, so Louise can’t sleep with him unless she’s his wife. A divorce will take more time than Louise has. Making Jim a widower is quicker.

Is love without the possibility of parole preferable to being alone? To answer that question, the true-crime fiction novel Friends to the End takes a brutally hilarious deep-dive into the depths we’re willing to sink to in order to hang onto dysfunctional relationships.

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