The Engagement: A Novel
When two lives collide in a dangerous erotic game, the definitions of desire and revulsion, sanity and madness, truth and deception become deliberately blurred as Hooper (A Child’s Book of True Crime, 2002) leads the reader down a sparsely written, psychologically twisting path. Liese Campbell works for her uncle’s property business in Melbourne, Australia. She meets Alexander Colquhoun during a private rental showing and spontaneously, almost unthinkingly, pulls him onto the empty apartment’s bed for a quick tryst. When he subsequently pays her, they begin a possibly sordid, certainly erotic relationship that involves intimate knowledge of one another’s bodies yet the barest information about each other’s true personalities. Alexander invites Liese to his country place for a weekend, and, from there, the plot spirals into a tangle of unanswered questions, hidden meanings, and the distinct chance of a diabolical plot that may hold Liese captive forever. This will appeal to readers seeking gothic-styled, psychosexual literary examinations of adult predilections and passions. A far darker, more stylistically intricate, and more disturbing cousin of Fifty Shades of Grey. --Julie Trevelyan