Patsy Pringle, an aging, one-time prostitute who can still turn heads, returns to the small, Illinois town where she was forced to give up her baby when she was just 16. She comes back to make amends to her son 18 years later but ends up kidnapping him from a life wasted in an institution. They’re hunted by the boy’s father’s father, a minister, who has an arrest warrant in one pocket and his brother, the town Sheriff, in the other Take a ride on the back of Patsy’s Harley from heartland prairie to L.A.’s skid row.
Michael Just writes book-length fiction and nonfiction as well as short fiction. His other novels, The Dirt, The Crippy and The Mind Altar can be found through Amazon, and his website, https://justmike.just.com. His short stories are available in print and online.
Title: The Rainbow Rim
Publisher: Giddings Street Press
Author: Michael C. Just
Wholesale/Individual Orders: Ingram
Pub Date: May 27, 2026
Genre: Mainstream Contemporary
Contact the author:
Website: https://www.justmikejust.com
Email: info@justmikejust.com
Phone: (970) 799-2303
The Rainbow Rim
A Novel of Inspiration and Adventure
by Michael C. Just
The Rainbow Rim is as an 87,000-word work of mainstream contemporary fiction that follows the story of Patsy Pringle, a fallen woman of insatiable appetite and immense talent. Employing a highly visual, cinematic style, this 85-chapter novel portrays a woman of indescribable beauty and inner strength struggling to overcome her past as a prostitute so she can redeem herself by mothering the mentally challenged son she was forced to give up 18 years before.
Patsy’s illegitimate son, Martin, provides an abstemious contrast that drives Patsy crazy since she can’t convince him who she is – the mother he’s intent on doing in for abandoning him at birth. Patsy breaks her son out of an institution where he doesn’t belong. They’re joined on the road by another psychiatric patient, Bob, who believes he can restore order to the U.N. if he can only convince everyone to speak in palindromes.
The three fugitives cross a rural America at turns pristine and prurient. Martin’s mission of vengeance is to track his mother down in Los Angeles – from where Patsy wrote him letters – and either do her in or have her arrested for ‘Abandonment and Irresponsibility.’ Patsy agrees to help Martin track herself down until she can convince him that someone as lowly as she would make an acceptable mother. But is she really ready for motherhood?
On the back of her Harley, on a cross-country train, and hitching through reservation land, they’re chased by the estimable Reverend Walter Tallman and his sleazy brother, Sheriff Chadwick, both desperate to cover up the smalltown crimes they committed 18 years ago – the Reverend’s impregnation of 16-year-old Patsy and the Sheriff’s expulsion of Patsy from the paradise of Ukiah, Illinois. But her true adversary is her own son, who’ll never believe a woman fallen so low could actually be his mother. Martin falls in love with her instead.
Patsy must convince a small town of a secret it doesn’t even know it keeps. Outnumbered, outgunned, and outlawed, Patsy takes them all on.