When heiress Claire Vanderbilk meets Renaissance man "Fast" Eddie Sullivan on a private beach on Aquidneck Island, sparks begin to fly in two directions: left and right. Eddie is a Vietnam veteran who lost an eye and his young Vietnamese bride in the Vietnam War three decades earlier. Claire is a Newport, RI socialite with blood the color of the deep blue sea. Even though highly skeptical of each other's politics, Claire and Eddie find themselves inexplicably drawn to one another, this in spite of the fact that Eddie has a girl. Victoria Jefferson, a direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemming is a single mom and may be the best thing that has happened to Eddie since the war. But just as Eddie is attracted to Claire, Victoria finds she is attracted to Claire's son Elliott, a successful entrepreneur in his own right. Eddie and Victoria find themselves fighting to maintain their fragile relationship as Claire and Elliott shower them with lavish gifts and ultimately genuine affection. Through the resulting clash of ideas and social classes these four individuals experience, their lives are changed dramatically as the existing social order is explored and exploded in this tale of the true price of wealth.
About the Author: David W. Christner was born in Sweetwater, Tennessee and raised in rural Oklahoma. He attended high school in Mountain View, a small farming community situated between the Washita River and the Wichita Mountains in the southwestern part of the state. As a Commissioned Officer in the U.S. Navy, Christner served three years at sea fighting the Vietnam War and two years ashore in Norfolk, VA. After completing his graduate education at the University of Oklahoma, Christner settled in southern Rhode Island and for more than two decades worked as a technical writer, editor and multimedia training developer for a variety of defense contractors and hi-tech multinational corporations during the day and wrote plays and novels at night. His stage plays The Wall, Bui-Doi: The Dust of Life, The Walk, Red Hot Mamas, The Babe, the Bard and the Baron, The Bitch of Baily's Beach, Ezra and Evil, What About Mimi?, and This Blood's For You have been finalists or winners in national/international playwriting competitions. Speculations on the cosmos, sex, war, religion, injustice, environmental exploitation, aging, women's issues, the homeless, the colonial slave trade and capital punishment have formed the thematic content of the plays and novels he has written so far. His plays have been produced in the U.S. Australia, Japan, Belgium, India, Italy and Canada. An Italian translation of Red Hot Mamas by Leonardo Franchini opened in Trento, Italy in 2016. Victor Weber's Russian translation premiered in Tula, Russia in May. Christner is theater critic for the Newport Mercury in Newport, RI. The Bitch of Bailey's Beach is one of his 19 full-length plays.