Review: Explosive Erotica
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 01 4, 2013
Barbary Coast pirates up until the year 1800 raided the Spanish coast to rob wine, supplies and women, who became sex slaves to the brigands in North Africa. In some of those villages, the elders did deals where, instead of leaving the pirates to randomly rape and pillage, provided both rations and two young women. Life was cruel, hard, unerringly dull, and I always imagined that had I been given the choice I would have sailed away with a swashbuckling corsair rather than staying behind with nothing but soil and toil in my future.Does every woman fantasize about having a piercing-eyed, broad-chested alpha-male to command her? This is at the heart of Sue Lyndon's exquisitely conceived fantasy "Rules of War," an erotic novel that follows the first law of erotica: that it is a novel, a story where sex, submission and punishment arise from plot, not sprinkled in like red peppers in a dreary pot of stew.The book starts explosively when a bomb ignited by the Free Island revolutionaries blows up Emma Conrad's apartment building and, lucky to be alive, she finds herself a captive of Commander John Rousseau, handsome, arrogant, charismatic - she wonders as he whisks her away to his hideaway what may have happened had they met under other circumstances?While the rebels continue their struggle, Emma nurses unsolved dilemmas from the past and wonders if she can find herself in John Rousseau's erotic regime of spanking, corporal punishment and fervid passion. Set in some unspecified time in an uncertain world, the plot clicks together like a jigsaw puzzle until, finally, the picture is both complete and immensely pleasing.