Fifty Shades of Blue and Pink

by

JJ is a twice-divorced, tattoed-and-pierced, tarot-reading dominatrix, whom we meet scowling over a failed date with Ben, a charming publisher with a fetish for wearing ladies lingerie. When some extremely compromising photos of a local thug land through her letterbox, it transpires that Ben has also been murdered, and soon JJ finds herself trying to connect the two.

As JJ investigates, a cast of complex kinksters, including JJ’s transvestite ex-husband Tanya, all turn out to have a wayward hand in the trouble. Most of them frequent the Pink Parrot, a local, parochial fetish club where JJ must dig for revelatory dirt and avoid the dead bodies piling up in the increasingly sinister seaside town.

Witty and well-paced, Ruth Ramsden’s debut erotic thriller, Blue Murder at the Pink Parrot, has all the romp and paranoia of a Wilkie Collins’ novel. While the odd narcotic encounter threatens to knock JJ off her course, the mist routinely clears and her goddess grit carries her through to renew the chase. Ramsden avoids the usual end-of-the-pier-cliches to create fetish scene characters as authentic as they are lucid, and the satisfying ending is as quirky and sexy as you’d hope from a dominatrix detective novel.

Blue Murder at the Pink Parrot by Ruth Ramsden. Published in paperback by Cutting Edge Press on 16th August £7.99; available as an e-book now, £5.14. Epub ISBN- 9781908122247