Title: Executive Privilege
Author Name & Publisher: Sydney Falk (Playfair Cipher Square)
Publication Date & Length: December 20, 2015 – 241 pgs
Sadistic urges meet corporate intrigue
Cathy Salzmann always kept to herself and floated through job after job until she landed at Ice Eleven. She had no idea that the company was run by her lost foster sister, and she had no idea that her job would actually change her life.
Alex Winters is reclusive, and seems so utterly different from who she was as a teenager. Her intentions and scruples are at best a question mark, and when Cathy’s approached by a federal investigator, her stressful work environment is the least of her worries.
Cathy finds her loyalties drawn in multiple directions as she gets to learn about who Alex has become — but what will she find out about herself along the way?
Executive Privilege is a 75,000+ word BDSM romance novel about a low-income office worker who’s thrust into a world where trust is the only currency that matters.
I wasn’t sure how I wanted to rate this book, to tell the truth. I like the erotic scenes: they were hot and explicit. I like how Alex teased and tormented Cathy, and I liked her honesty about how much Cathy’s pain and fear turn her on. She’s unapologetic about her kink, and that makes it easier to like her. Cathy is a little harder for me to understand. She starts out either not gay, or at least so repressed that she won’t admit to any sort of attraction to women. Alex, because of their past together, is like a magnet for Cathy, and the things that Alex makes her feel overwhelm her. The problem with Cathy, for me, is that she seems to allow Alex to dominate her without any resolution to her feelings. It’s almost as though she wants us to believe that she can’t help her response to Alex, so she won’t take any responsibility for how she feels. Which seems a bit pansy-ish to me. She does seem to finally make some choices near the end of the book, but that leads in to another problem I had with the book.
To me, there seems to be some logic disconnects in the narrative. By this I mean that events happen and the characters respond in a way that leaves me feeling confused as to why they responded that way. Or something happens that I’m not sure makes logical sense at all. For example, Cathy confesses to Alex that her initial acceptance of Alex’s sexual overtures may have been influenced by Quinn’s suggestions as an FBI agent. Alex says that she actually expected that and doesn’t have much of a response, but then five minutes later, Alex is so angry about it that she won’t speak to Cathy for the next 12 hours. There are several of these types of discordant transitions that left me scratching my head slightly.
In the end, I liked the book overall. The kink in it could be considered harsh and a bit extreme for some people. There’s also a type of pseudo-incestual dynamic that is more of a mind game than anything actually taboo, but some people may have a problem with even the thought. When I first got the book, I’m not sure I knew it was BDSM, nor did I know it was erotica. I personally don’t have a problem with either of those categories, but it definitely needs a bit of labeling.
Amy P.
