Amazon.com description: Product Description: It's not floods that the folks of Venice, Missouri fear, but earthquakes. And for the last few years, Alma van der Linden - the doctor's daughter, the principal's wife, the seismologist's lover - has been doing her modest very best to shake up this small Mississippi River town. The local reporter who says it like she sees it, Alma is the sharpest, the most daring, and, some would have it, quite damn near the sexiest woman in Venice. In Alma's restless life and priceless observations, Shelby Hearon has created her most wry, most unforgettable, and most entertaining portrait of a person and a place.