First published 1985
Lisa runs The Club. She built it, she owns it, and she sets every rule. The island resort exists for one purpose: to give wealthy, consenting adults a place to act out their most forbidden desires, with Lisa as the absolute authority over all of it. She is called the Perfectionist, and she has earned the name. Elliott is a photojournalist. He has covered wars. He has pointed his camera at death and not flinched. But the risk he signs up for at The Club is different. It is interior. It asks him to surrender the control he has spent his whole career maintaining. When Lisa and Elliott meet on the island, the power between them refuses to stay fixed. She is the mistress. He is the subject. But desire does not follow org charts. Anne Rice, writing as Anne Rampling, builds the tension between these two people with the same precision she brings to her supernatural fiction. What begins as a structured transaction between a dominant woman and a willing man becomes something neither of them planned for. The emotional core of the book is not the fantasy. It is what happens when two people who have built their lives around control discover they want something that costs them both something real.
Genres: literary-fiction, adult-fiction, psychological-thriller, erotica, contemporary-romance
Vibes: intense, intimate, psychologically-complex, sensual, thought-provoking
Tropes: dominant-submissive, emotional-connection, power-dynamics, slow-burn
Setting: The Club, island resort
377 pages · Paperback · Ballantine Books
Content warnings: explicit-sexual-content