Bella Pollen, a best-selling British author who lives part-time in the American Southwest, is the author of Hunting Unicorns, which was a smash success in the UK, where it was selected as a Best Summer Read by the Richard and Judy Show (the Oprah of England). In that novel she took an American journalist to London with romantic and comedic results. In her new book, Pollen places a British mother of two in a tiny abandoned mining town on the Mexican border of Arizona and spins a romantic and dangerous story about betrayal and freedom against the backdrop of immigration politics. Needing a respite from her claustrophobic marriage in London, Alice Coleman moves her two small children to the Arizona desert with the intention of renovating the abandoned village her husband acquired in a failed business scheme--and there escapes to a solitude she craves and hadn't thought possible. But the vast and unruly Southwest has room for the dreams of more than one fugitive. In this dusty, alien atmosphere everyone has something to hide--from Benjamin, the town's Mexican caretaker, to the immigrants who risk their lives to cross the border, to the laconic cowboy Duval, whom Alice finds herself falling for. As winter moves to scorching summer, what seemed idyllic turns deadly as Alice is drawn deeper into an obsessive quest for revenge until finally she must decide how much she is willing to sacrifice in order to preserve not only her freedom, but Benjamin and Duval's as well. A compelling and perilous love story, Midnight Cactus explores the tensions between unrealized dreams and the pull of family. In a blistering climax, Alice discovers it is only by risking everything that one learns what is reallyworth living for.