HARD CANDY! Candice Summers, stage name "Candi," is the star stripper at Nockers' Up-Town Bar and Grille. By day, she attends an ultra-conservative college. In pursuit of her dream of becoming a writer of Christian romance novels, she enrolls in summer writing workshops at a remote conference center in the high mountains of Northeastern Oregon. The star attraction is an aging Russian refugee poet, Viktor Karshenko, who is mistakenly thought by all involved to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature along with its million dollar honorarium. Together Candi's ex-boyfriend, Jesse Zafarelli, aka Red Hawk, a chronically unemployed, small-time criminal, boozer and drug user (who claims he is really a Nez Perce Indian) and a Neanderthal bouncer from the club, Big Cal, plot to kidnap Karshenko and hold him for ransom in the alpine wilderness. Jesse hopes to win Candi back and retire to Belize with big bucks, and Big Cal, too, has desires for Candi. The plot begins to unravel dramatically as Jesse and Cal, in their incompetence, find events rapidly spinning out of control and their hopes for riches and Candi, as well as their own lives and hers, suddenly in serious jeopardy.