Review: As wonderful as I expected it to be
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 04 17, 2013
I love Tiffany Reisz. I adore her books and the characters in them. In fact, if I have a reading crush, she is it. So I can't explain how this story could have been on my Kindle, unread, for at least a few months. Mind you, I'm not complaining. It was very nice to have a new to me Tiffany Reisz story while I'm impatiently waiting for summer and the release of The Mistress Files and The Mistress. I intend to re-read every single Original Sinners book and short between now and the release dates, but still, reading something I had never read before was like finding an unexpected present.So, this is a story featuring Kingsley Edge, although it is not really about him. The story is about Derek who tells his friends about his meeting with a mermaid a year previously. He was sitting in a club, waiting for his date, when he noticed a beautiful and completely wet young woman. When she comes over to his table and puts out the fire in his table's centre-piece he is mesmerized, and although he almost loses her when she has to leave he follows her and discovers the club where she works. A club, with a mythical reputation and owned by Kingsley Edge. This is the club with the mermaids; young virgins entertaining men while never allowing intimacy. Once a mermaid loses her virginity she has to leave the club.Xenia, the mermaid who has bewitched Derek, seems to be as attracted to him as he is to her but is very reluctant to leave the safety of the club that has not only offered her very well paid work but has also been her home for three years. With Xenia determined to hang on to her virginity and Derek struggling to hold himself back a happy ending appears unlikely.Like I said above, I'm a huge fan of Tiffany Reisz so I'm not surprised that I loved this story. Neither am I surprised that she managed to tell a complete story with interesting and fully fleshed characters in only 50 pages. This story is as clever and surprising as I've come to expect from this author. Reisz doesn't write predictable tales, she doesn't rehash old refrains or fall back on the tried and tested. Her remarkable imagination means that every character Reisz introduces in each of her stories is a true original. And because Kingsley Edge does play an important role in this story it is very much connected to the Original Sinners books. And any opportunity to revisit that world is like a little bit of heaven to me. Only Tiffany Reisz could come up with mermaids in the middle of Manhattan and have it come across as completely normal and realistic. And she is the only author I can think of who would combine the heat of sexual attraction with the relative innocence of "The Little Mermaid".This wouldn't be a Tiffany Reisz story if it wasn't also incredibly sexy. Who knew that not giving in to your desires could be as hot as a fully fleshed sex scene? I didn't, but I do now. After reading this story I can't help thinking that there should be some sort of ritual every time a girl or woman is about to lose her virginity. Just to make the big transition as special as it should be but rarely is.