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Maine town of Empire Falls. As a young man, Charles longs to escape and indeed manages to linger in Mexico for almost a decade, but in the end a more powerful destiny tugs him back to Maine:
    For his part, Charles Beaumont Whiting, sent away from home as a boy when he would have preferred to stay, now had no more desire to return from Mexico than his mother had to return from Europe, but when summoned he sighed and did as he was told, much as he had always done. It wasn't as if he hadn't known that the end of his youth would arrive, taking with it his travels, his painting, and his poetry. There was never any question that Whiting and Sons Enterprises would one day devolve to him, and while it occurred to him that returning to Empire Falls and taking over the family business might be a violation of his personal destiny as an artist, there didn't seem to be any help for it.
    In other words, C.B. is torn between bohemian freedom in Mexico and financial security at home in Maine, and he chooses the latter. But that is not the end of his inner conflict. Although he appears to accept this destiny, C.B. begins to build himself a hacienda (in Maine?) across the river from Empire Falls. Later, the arrival of a decomposed moose among the river trash that regularly washes ashore by his hacienda-in-progress provokes in C.B. a personal crisis:
    Now, down by the river, his thoughts disturbed, perhaps, by the proximity of rotting moose, he began to doubt that building this new house was a good idea. The hacienda, with its adjacent artist's studio, was surely an invitation to his former self, the Charles Beaumont Whiting—Beau, his friends called him there— he'd abandoned in Mexico. Worse, it was for this younger, betrayed self that he was building the hacienda.
    His inner conflict isn't over. C.B.'s conflicted spirit eventually seeks relief in an affair with a pretty young worker at his family's shirt factory—fragile Grace, the mother of the novel's protagonist, Miles Roby. This affair shadows Miles's childhood and leads C.B.'s iron-willed wife, Francine, the novel's antagonist, eventually to reel in and dominate not only Grace but Miles himself throughout his adult years.
    Thus, the powerful inner conflict that Russo builds for C.B. Whiting spreads to affect generations beyond C.B's. Indeed, it nearly causes the destruction of Empire Falls itself.
    Is there any character in contemporary fiction more conflicted than Laurell K. Hamilton's wildly successful series heroine Anita Blake? Anita is a St. Louis "animator," or raiser of the dead. (Why raise the dead, you ask? Among other reasons, to question them about the details of their wills.) She also works as a court-sanctioned vampire killer; vampires being, in Hamilton's alternate world, real and endowed with certain limited rights.
    Anita Blake is tough, but in contrast has a soft spot for vampires and other were-creatures. Indeed, her series-long love interest is the French master vampire Jean-Claude. As the series progresses she becomes engaged, then unengaged, to a junior high school teacher and alpha werewolf of the local pack, Richard Zeeman. Indeed, it is Richard who draws Anita to Tennessee in Blue Moon , the novel that finally brought Hamilton to The New York Times paperback best-seller list. Richard has been arrested in the small town of Myerton, accused of rape. It is up to Anita to exonerate him before a rare "blue moon," only five days away, sends Richard on an uncontrollable feeding binge.
    Anita's inner conflict—enforcing the law vs. sympathy (indeed, lust) for the creatures she is meant to hunt—would alone be enough, you would think, to energize this steamy and complex novel. But Hamilton does not stop there. Richard is her ex-fiance at this point, but she still has strong feelings for him even though she has firmly chosen Jean-Claude for reasons we learn at the beginning of the novel:
    Richard was an alpha werewolf. He was head of the local pack. It was his only