Review: Selling Scarlett
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 10 10, 2013
This book review was originally written for my blog All the Things Inbetween at AliCrean.com. Allow for wording that may refer to Amazon as if it is off-site.This weeks recommendation is a romantic suspense by Ella James called Selling Scarlett. I found this book on Amazon on a search for free Amazon books. It is the first in her new Love Inc. series about a seedy underworld pleasure brothel in the Nevada desert that caters to the affluently jaded and infamously bored.Hunter West, unrepentant famous bad boy poker player and heir to family owned West Bourbon Empire, is tired of the never-ending parties with socialites and try-hards who come in and out of his life. He barely registers interest in the comings and goings of his own actions, much less those of those he encounters these days. Still he has a hard time turning down his longtime friend when he summons him to his brothel, Love Inc., to entertain porn star Priscilla Heat who Marchant Radcliffe has long desired. This leads to a horribly disturbing relationship between Priscilla and Hunter that becomes increasingly complicated and unhealthy throughout the book. What begins with Hunter trying to stick close to Priscilla to solve the riddle of a few missing hours of a night spent in her company devolves into a twisted physical power exchange which has him questioning his own alarming response to his more deviant proclivities.Enter Elizabeth DeVille, who has longed since a tender teen to catch Hunter's eye. She is the heiress of the DeVille Water Empire (how is that for juxtaposition?) and lives in turmoil as her father pretty much holds her families money in a tight fist because her mother is pretty much the biggest black hole screw-up there is. Elizabeth has her own conflicting situations and difficult relationships. Often plagued by more than her fair share of guilt Elizabeth seeks to find a way to care for her friend Cross when it becomes clear to her that his own family won't. This desire is near impossible in light of the fact that she is living on the charity of her best friend Suri. Faced with having nothing to offer as collateral to acquire a loan, Elizabeth turns to a more desperate means and sells her innocence when she becomes aware that in the shady underbelly world of the sex market her v-card is worth more than any thing she might be able to put up in a more traditional means.During a fateful few days the stars align Hunter's playmate for the evening goes missing, Elizabeth (Lizzy/Libby) has an encounter with Hunter that she has fantasized about forever and Cross is in a terrible accident leaving him in a coma. From there the main plot takes off and the real story begins and the twisty turvy braiding of interwoven stories begin to shape into a very well put together mystery that leaves you battling a fairly consistent WTF? throughout the majority of the book.There were a few parts that I didn't feel ever got clarification. At one part Cross is in the hospital and Lizzy arrives just after another visitor and the nurse tells her that someone named Sari had just been there and I never was sure if it was Lizzy's friend Suri or the missing Sarabelle. Also it was never explained why Hunter had such a tight relationship with Lovelace. Maybe that will be clarified in Lovelace's story, should she have one. It just felt a whole lot like a loose string to me.Overall I really enjoyed this novel. I had never read an Ella James book before and I had been attracted to the idea of Elizabeth selling her virginity at March's brothel. I didn't go into that so much in this review because even though the title of the book suggests that her auctioning of her purity is the focus of the novel it really honestly is not as important as many of the other things that take place.I will read more of the Love Inc. books. I really am more interested in reading about reading about the people at the brothel than I am Cross who is the hero of the second book, Taming Cross, which was released in August. I really didn't like him to be fair, he rubbed me wrong. I'd like to see where Ella James goes with her characters and it will be nice to see how she develops new suspenseful situations.