Introduction
California is the single most highly populated of the United States, and there are few indications that its rate of population growth is likely to decrease. While some people have fled the state during the past year because of fear of earthquakes and loss of employment in the aerospace industry, enough others keep entering to more than make up for the emigration. California continues to grow, and large areas of it become more and more urbanized every day.
There are, of course, huge acreages that the builders have not yet touched. More than forty percent of the land, for instance, is still forested, and there are rugged mountains and forbidding deserts which will undoubtedly remain almost completely uninhabitable for many years to come. A would-be hermit could, indeed, find many ideal places to live in isolation in the Golden State; but when all things are considered rapid population growth must be rated among California's major problems.
It is one among many. Others include smog, floods, forest fires, the pollution of water by undersea oil leakage in the Santa Barbara Channel, and the threat of a calamitous earthquake along the San Andreas Fault. A recent University of California study reached the conclusion that Californians must expect a major earthquake to occur every sixty to one hundred years. We have already had one big one, followed by almost countless minor aftershocks, in 1971. No one we know of, however, interprets this to mean that we won't have another until 2031.
Water supply is another major problem. California's long, dry summers and many desert areas have spurred widespread construction of dams, reservoirs and aqueducts, but the continuing population growth has kept the ratio of water use almost always at a near-crisis level. Many residents do not realize all the implications of this: a young lady who recently moved from Los Angeles to Colorado wrote to friends back home in very bitter terms. "I've rarely seen as beautiful a land as Colorado," she said, "but I'm getting downright militant about the water situation. It costs fifty dollars just for a permit to sink a well on your own property up here, and the reason is that California has almost unlimited supply of water which it rips off from Colorado. Irrigation water is scarce and costly, and most of the locals hate the Angelenos for the situation being as it is. Water is precious here, though it is abundant, since we don't get too much use of it. California steals it and wastes it. There is no push to conserve the supply there, and most of the people down there think the supplies are unlimited. They have no idea what it is doing to Colorado, and I suspect that few of them would care. You get a very different perspective on such things when you are outside the careless perimeters of Los Angeles County."
Another young lady who acquires a new perspective on California problems when her own situation changes radically is Anabel Crichton, the heroine of Bella Dietrich's new novel, Enslavement for a Divorcee. The tall, voluptuous, red-haired divorcee is the municipal assistant for Del Monte, a seaside resort and retirement community. She takes the job for the convenience of being near her mother, who will care for her two young children, but throws herself completely into both the job and the community to try to forget Hal Crichton, her promoter ex-husband.
Determined to make a meaningful life for herself and her children, Anabel plunges into the intrigue and exploitative machinations of local politics. But Hal follows her even to this quite, beautiful community and continues to plague her. Hal works for a shady development company which wants to buy the lovely Bello property adjoining Del Monte and cash in on it by turning it into a huge subdivision. The more conservation-minded citizens are unalterably opposed to this move, and it is obvious that a serious battle is in the offing. Hal Crichton has two missions: to persuade Anabel to return to him and to persuade the civic leaders of the practicality of the new subdivision. Anabel, as a result, has two problems, which are interrelated and inseparable from each other.
The cast of characters in Miss Dietrich's newest work is large and exceptionally well-drawn. Arthur Bello owns the disputed property and feels he must sell it to keep from being ruined by the exorbitant taxes on agricultural land. Doris Kandlebinder, chairman of the planning commission, is a widow with too much time on her hands and so sexually starved that she makes an easy mark for Hal's designs. And there are many others, all bound up in an intricately complex plot that will keep the reader in constant suspense. As publishers of Dansk Blue Books, we feel that this is one of the most sophisticated and intriguing stories we have ever published. It will entertain you; it will occasionally shock you-and it will give you a totally new picture of that vast, sprawling, and infinitely variegated state that is California.
-The Publishers