Preposterous by Jennifer Mason
Although it is Elizabeth Cromwell, tall, imposing, blond and beautiful, who strides through Preposterous (Exponential Press) Jennifer Mason’s latest work of fiction — often brandishing a braided whip — she’s seldom alone. She’s got an almost endless and certainly multifarious troupe of characters in tow.
VARIOUS SUPPORTING CHARACTERS
There’s Harrington, her hard-working librarian and willing sex slave of more than a decade; a reclusive billionaire with a state-of-the-art S&M dungeon; an ex-lover with admittedly bad-girl manners; a ruthless, amoral abortionist with a penchant for murder; a few corpses with mysterious backstories; a missing heiress; a couple of struggling poets trying to keep a magazine alive; and one very helpful cop with a limp and a smart wife.
Ms. Cromwell is a professional dominatrix especially good at discretion, networking and — her specialty — caning. She presides over what she has called “The English Department,” where her clients are serviced in their own brand of erotica. She’s certainly not a detective, but she’s clever; and the world of dominance and submission is a multi-layered one, cloaked in edgy secrecy. But when things go bad, people know — but which people know? Who’s talking? And who simply isn’t talking?
CROMWELL RETURNS TO SOLVE ANOTHER MYSTERY
Preposterous is not Mason’s first story with Ms. Cromwell center stage, but each of the Elizabeth Cromwell mysteries brings a completely new set of plots and subplots. Here, she is summoned to help locate the beneficiary of a sizable trust left by a client who has, by all accounts, thrown himself into the sea, leaving his change and the keys to his car in the tip jar at a local Starbucks.
But nothing at all is what it seems. Ms. Cromwell, for starters, was not the man’s therapist, as he told his wife, and each contact, each clue, each introduction, only makes the job more complicated. Mason does a fine job of splicing murder mysteries with titillating splashes of erotica without either one overshadowing the other. There are secret hideaways, buried fetuses, betrayals, heroic rescues, and identifying dental records. And Elizabeth Cromwell kills a man with her bare hands.
To say that Mason has included something for just about everyone might be an understatement, and for those who are just now introduced to Ms. Cromwell, there are Mason’s previous books — and the promise of another. Because at the very end of Preposterous, Elizabeth Cromwell’s job isn’t done. She has an idea, she muses. An idea that readers will be eager to learn more about in the next installment.
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About Jennifer Mason:
At age 14, Jennifer Mason left Kansas for Malibu. With a nagging alter ego, neither able to talk herself into nor out of a commitment to writing, she took the coast road to San Francisco. In an abandoned Prohibition speakeasy, she invented the English Department, where she discovered a voice in a brand of professional dominance as mysterious in its puritan fantasy as it is comical in its enactments of how we need to feel. She is the author of five previous novels, The Oddball Gypsy Raconteur, Valedictorian, Sebastopol, Tors Lake, and Partitions of Unity. Her stories follow their characters through scenes of what they think they see when they are most confused, the way things usually are when we struggle for an erotic connection. She lives and writes on Noe Street.
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