“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 sister disappears in the Bay Area, she asks incarcerated serial killer “the Manteca Maniac” for help, which turns into something more. After she becomes Mrs. Maniac, her parents throw her out. Delores moves closer to the prison to focus on her marriage, where she becomes instant BFFs with a neighbor who also just moved in.

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. Louise can’t spend the night with the Maniac until she’s his wife, but a divorce will take more time than they have left. Making him 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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