Foreword
If asked to identify the essential elements of a crime, most of us would immediately think of two -- a criminal and his victim. But there is often a third party -- as innocent as the victim yet closely tied to the criminal through a blood or marriage relationship.
Too often we forget that the sentence society may impose on the wrong-doer extends to his family. Their prison might be a prison of the mind, but the result can be the same. Disorientation, loss of self-respect, change of character -- these are only a few of the terrible things that may occur when a loved one is jailed without warning.
In A Jailer's Playmate a young bride is suddenly confronted with this situation. Only days after their wedding, her husband is arrested and charged with a serious crime -- a crime committed before they had met. Having just recently come halfway across the continent to escape an intolerable family situation, she is left alone in a strange city, friendless and unwilling to ask her family for help.
Had Mary Stewart been more wise to the ways of the world, or even slightly less naive, she might have avoided the human vultures who prey on unfortunate people like herself. In her zeal to help her husband, she was exploited by those to whom she had turned for aid.
Compounding her agony, the young girl is only just awakening to the mysteries of sex. She finds herself unable to control -- or even to understand -- the physiological forces which threaten to destroy her. Author Morgan Savage has clearly and poignantly shown how these forces -- when improperly diverted -- can break down the human spirit and, ultimately, the body.
This is not a pretty story. It lays bare the realities of an unfortunate aspect our society -seemingly respectable people who are quick to turn any situation to their own advantage. It would be wrong and foolish to pretend that people like these do not exist in much the same circumstances as the author has presented them.
-The Publishers Sausalito, California December, 1973