"Lisa Moore's first novel is a wickedly fresh introduction to St. John's, Newfoundland. Its denizens jostle one another in uneasy arabesques of desire, greed, and ambition, all the while yearning for purity and redemption. Collen, a would-be ecoterrorist, is inexorably drawn to alligators. Her widowed mother, Beverly, is cloaked in grief. Beverly's sister, Madeleine, is a filmmaker obsessed with completing her magnum opus before she dies. And Frank, a young man whose life is a strange anthology of unpredictable dangers, is desperate to protect his hot-dog stand from Valentin, a sociopathic Russian sailor whose predatory tendencies threaten everyone he encounters. Alligator examines the ruthless reptilian and painfully human sides of all of us."--Jacket.