An absorbing and alluring love story.
In Sykes’ (Stealing Beauty, 2019, etc.) erotic romance, a writer becomes entangled with an FBI agent and his BDSM lifestyle.
Journalist Chloe Martin leaves her four-year marriage after her controlling husband, Neil Hollins, rapes her. Three years later, she’s in New York City, shadowing FBI agent Sharon Silverman for a story on the Latin Kings gang. However, when her friend Carina, an investigative journalist, invites her to local BDSM club Decadence, she accepts. Although she doesn’t regularly partake in that lifestyle, she knows enough about it to maintain a second career as an author of BDSM romances. Apparently, many New York City–based feds are into BDSM, and one, Agent Dexter Scott, shows Chloe around the club. The two play out a scene—for “research”—in which she submits to Dex, who’s a dom. Dex’s boss later assigns him to escort Chloe as she pursues her Latin Kings story. The fed and the writer initially butt heads because the assertive Chloe isn’t at all submissive outside the club. But they’re eventually drawn to each other, and Dex brings Chloe into BDSM with his “subtle dominance.” Chloe’s been celibate ever since Neil’s assault, and she doesn’t desire the intimacy of sex aside from oral pleasure. Dex will have to earn her trust if they hope to sustain their relationship. This book is part of a series, and many of its characters have appeared in Sykes’ earlier tales. However, the author’s concise descriptions of her characters and their backstories make it work well as a briskly paced stand-alone. Sykes alternates sensual, edifying BDSM scenes with others of Dex and Chloe connecting in other ways, such as binge-watching episodes of the TV show Supernatural. The two face numerous hurdles, such as the arrival of Neil, who tracks down his ex-wife, and Dex’s struggle to get over a previous dom-sub relationship. As a result, Chloe’s journalistic endeavors only occasionally crop up in the story, often leading to scenes of brawny Dex protecting her from gangsters. But the main romance plot is thoroughly engaging, and Sykes respectfully and enticingly highlights a lifestyle with which some readers may not be familiar.
An absorbing and alluring love story.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72755-754-1
Page Count: 280
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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