Candy

By Kevin Brooks

Joe is a good kid from a good family. But then he meets and falls for a young street whore named Candy. Candy works for a bad guy pimp,Iggy, who controls her through her addiction to heroin. And Iggy doesn't care for Joe and Candy becoming buddies and he threatens to cut Joe's throat. But Joe can't stop thinking about her and he tracks Iggy to the house where he is keeping Candy. Joe manages to sneak in to see Candy but Iggy finds out and in the confrontation Candy busts him over the head and she and Joe escape, knowing that Iggy will do his worst to find them.
Joe takes Candy to a cottage his dad owns and stays with her as she goes through withdrawal but Iggy finds them and this time someone is going to die.

This was a pretty good story. Some parts were a little hard to swallow, like that Joe just happens to have a deserted cottage where he can take Candy and that his sister, who is a nurse, would let a kid like him take a drug addict to such a place unsupervised and all alone. Heroin withdrawal is not a pretty thing and it's hard to believe a nurse would agree to a kid handling it all on his own. Still it was pretty engrossing.