Z. L. Darryl

The book starts out by noting that as a child, Joy was constantly being whipped by her aggressive father as punishment. Joy constantly fought back, got into trouble, and was whipped. Her mother, on the other hand, was submissive. We learn through the flow of the book, that Joy followed neither her father's nor her mother's inclination in adulthood. Joy ended up with traces of both traits. Somewhat similar to the lead woman in Ann Rice's "Exit to Eden," who ran a d/s island as a dominant, but who had a submissive past and submissive urges. As the book unfolds, Joy, herself will find out that she likes to dominate others, and, when forced, can find pleasure in the submissive position.

One of Joy's best friends, Lydia, was a prostitute. Despite Joy's belief that what Lydia did was wrong, "abused her womanhood," she rather liked Lydia, so much so that they ended up sleeping together. On the other hand, Joy could never see herself sleeping with a man, and so, while she envied Lydia's ability to afford nice clothes, she could not go for the "easy money" directly. Joy, Lydia and a real estate agent client of Lydia's got together an idea to buy and run a brothel, with Joy as the madam. The property found was away from neighbors and came with an interesting basement with many bondage and torture devices. They could make big money from that basement, though a more straight forward prostitution business would occur upstairs.

The business boomed, Joy ran numerous girls and the basement was used profitably. In the meantime, Joy found herself dominating others, and being dominated by another. This state of affairs continued until a new girl arrived, but we do not want to give away all the details.

The book contains domination, submission, bondage, torture, and humiliation. The plot is straight forward enough, while there were some twists and turns, there is nothing unexpected. Altogether, the plot, characters, and setting (not sure where everything took place (of course the book opens noting that "The streets of any big city are pretty much all the same . . ," so it probably doesn't matter where the action is occurring, though some description would have been nice, would have grounded the story and made it less words on paper) nor time period, though the fact that Lydia was a $3 hooker was somewhat interesting, and possible clue) were shallow. Nice 160 paperback pages of action, but in the end, neither particularly memorable nor remarkable.… (meer)