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brackenmacleod 's review for:
Control Freak
by Christa Faust
Three and a half stars. It's a decent first novel that is more about the main character's sexual/psychological self discovery than the murder mystery that bookends the real story. Although the book has thriller aspirations (that pay off in spades in Faust's work for Hard Case Crime), the initial conventional storyline introduced here is quickly abandoned and left only hinted at for the lion's share of the novel. When that story picks back up again at the end, it moves quickly (and a little improbably). However, the murder mystery is not as compelling as the down-the-rabbit-hole examination of professional SM culture. The real tension in the book comes from wondering whether there will come a moment in Caitlin's increasingly dark bildungsroman that is too much for her to endure. I'd recommend this one to anyone looking for a real SM book, not some dilettante Twlight fan fic.
NOTE: There's an incredibly frustrating it's/its problem throughout the book that, having read Faust's other work, had to be the result of an insane editor's interference when first published by Masquerade Books. That's how I'm rationalizing it, anyway.
NOTE: There's an incredibly frustrating it's/its problem throughout the book that, having read Faust's other work, had to be the result of an insane editor's interference when first published by Masquerade Books. That's how I'm rationalizing it, anyway.