Krantz is indebted to Hamlet for the essential conflict in the novel, which begins with the shocking announcement that Maxi's mother has married her father's brother just a short while after that beloved man's death, and ends with the revelation that the uncle murdered the father, Krantz, however, is not as interested in the tortured search for revenge as the motivation for such evil, which she identifies as unswerving envy of the younger, less-successful brother for the older. Envy, suggests Krantz, is a slow poison which destroys an otherwise promising individual.