Never the face

the long version

The heroine of Never the Face is searching. She's dissatisfied with love and bored with sex. In her experience, all lovers are predictably dull- and she longs for more, for an intensity she knows exists but has yet to discover. Just after her thirty-third birthday, she runs into an old flame who's now married. David invites her to dinner. Then he says, "I spent the weekend choosing a stick to beat you with." With these words, unable to resist the allure of sexual submission, she falls into an abyss of violent intimacy and excruciating pleasure. But as their brutal bond begins to unravel, carrying them together into an unfathomable territory of increasing violence and sexual extremes, she begins to discover the full, destructive power of obsessive love- and gradually spins out of control.--From book jacket.