Truman Capote's great unfinished novel blisters with scandal and malice. His candid exposé of the exclusive world of the very rich teems with beautiful, spiteful women, psychotic and sadistic husbands, and other thinly disguised friends and acquaintances of the author. At its centre is one P. B. Jones, an amoral bisexual of unknown parentage, who lives by his wits and his charm. As the novel opens, P. B. has tumbled from the heights, which he had finally scaled, back to the gutter which he thought he had left for ever . . .