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I recently received an advance copy of Hurt For Me by Heather Levy. A BDSM-focused mystery? Yes, please.

Actually, no thank you.

While the writing is quite capable, the book itself is full of tropes — the super-hot detective, the abused woman who leaves when she becomes pregnant, the hooker (well, dominatrix) with the heart of gold, and what I call the Laurell K. Hamilton effect. That’s where the author is covering a topic not a lot of people know about, or who know about it but only know the wrong things, so said author spends a lot of time explaining the “right” way to do things by giving examples (or, in some cases, outright expositing). With Hamilton, it’s polyamory and BDSM; with Levy, at least in this book, it’s BDSM.

I won’t say I rage-quit the book, but I did stop reading it around chapter ten, where the main character’s guardian (the aforementioned dominatrix with the heart of gold) starts explaining “Safe, Sane, and Consensual”. Yes, that’s important, but the moment the book started to feel like a textbook or an explainer article, I had to stop.

I’m not going to say I’m the best author ever at explaining BDSM and polyamory, but I explain it the way I like to read it. I did not particularly enjoy the abused pregnant woman suddenly deciding that being a dominatrix was the best thing for her, so she should ask her guardian to teach her.

Also, and this is a personal thing, I don’t really enjoy reading books about female domination that include humiliation (especially SPH) and ABDL. I’m not going to say that the author kinkshamed anything, but the way the main character referred to one of her ABDL clients didn’t really do it for me.

Nor did the sexual abuse, which, while not graphic per se, went in a direction that I don’t think it needed to go in, just to show that the abused woman’s baby daddy was a bad person. We knew that already; there’s such a thing as piling it on.

But here’s the biggest problem: I did not care one bit about the missing person that was the inciting incident of the main through-line of the book. He was one of the main character’s clients, and he made an overture toward trying to date said MC, and she turned out to be the last person to see him before he disappeared. I wasn’t at all interested in him; nor was I interested in the super-hot detective who was assigned to investigate his disappearance. It was quite obvious that, by the end of the book, the MC would have at least had sex with the detective, if not entered into a relationship with him (see my previous post on the enemies-to-lovers trope). I’m not against enemies-to-lovers, but I’ve seen this story too many times for it to catch my attention.

I would say that Hurt For Me appeals to a few specific subsets of readers: BDSM enthusiasts who like to see kink in a non-erotica setting, people who enjoy reading about wronged women taking back their power, fans of enemies-to-lovers where the enemy isn’t a bad person (the author went out of her way to make sure we didn’t hate the super-hot detective, who was just doing his job), and mystery readers who like things a little spicy. Your mileage may vary. It wasn’t the book for me; it might be the book for you.

And, hey, congrats to the author on getting published. Whether or not I liked the book, I know how hard that is, and she pulled it off — and got her book included in one of those Kindle pre-release promotional things, which I’ve never managed to do. Hope springs eternal, though.