The love bus

"The Love Bus" is an explosive drama about four people whose paths meet by chance on a coast-to-coast bus excursion one torrid July.

Once they meet and plunge into passionate affairs, their lives are theretofore set into motion, altering appreciably from what they had been like previously.

Ellen Powers boarded the bus in Los Angeles in a thoroughly crushed frame of mind. The striking redhead had just recently divorced her husband Ben, a man for whom she can feel enormously in bed, but not so much outside it. Her plan is to go back to her native Chicago to live with her sister, get a job, and start back on the road to emotional recovery.

Then Ellen encounters traveling companion Ron Stacy, a handsome but markedly unsuccessful young salesman, heading for New York in hopes of changing his streak of bad luck.

Ultimately Ellen is confronted by a major decision-whether to follow through with her original plans of staying with her sister in Chicago or taking a second wild gamble in love with Ron, all the while remaining acutely aware of the heartbreaks she sustained by throwing caution to the winds once.

Tami Stevens decides to travel back to New York to visit her mother in Long Island. Victimized by an unexciting marriage, Tami's restlessness attracts the notice of rugged Burt Kilburn, a cheap but nonetheless romantically charismatic hoodlum escaping from the law and endeavoring to return to his native, Newark, New Jersey, where he hopes to rejoin forces with an underworld kingpin.

Burt systematically disguises his station in life from Tami, effectively wooing her, then using her in a crucial situation in which he finds himself pursued by the FBI.

Ursula Parkins combines mystery and romance in "The Love Bus," a story with stark emotional impact.