Review: The Red – Tiffany Reisz

*I received a free copy of The Red from via Publisher. This has in no way influenced my voluntary review, which is honest and unbiased *

Never make a promise you don’t intend to keep…
Mona Lisa St. James made a deathbed promise that she would do anything to save her mother's art gallery. Unfortunately, not only is The Red painted red, but it's in the red. She soon realizes she has no choice but to sell it.
Just as she realizes she has no choice but to sell it, a mysterious man comes in after closing time and makes her an offer: He will save The Red if she agrees to submit to him for the period of one year.
The man is handsome, English, and terribly tempting...but surely her mother didn't mean for Mona to sell herself to a stranger. Then again, she did promise to do anything to save The Red...

The Red is mysterious, scandalous, strange, and weirdly arousing.

If I had to put The Red into a genre box, I’d be in big trouble, as it’s a great mix with the strongest part being erotica. As always, Reisz managed to draw me in from the beginning with her enticing Mona and the very mysterious Malcolm. There is a fairy tale feel to this story, there is something that is similar to magic, but not quite, and there is also some very erotic passages, where the lines between real life and something not completely real are blurred.

The Red follows Mona after she realizes that she might not be able to keep her death-bed promise to her mom. Keeping the gallery in the family is important to her, but there just isn’t any more money left. When a mysterious, beautiful stranger enters the gallery late one evening, everything Mona has known up until now might change. He will save the gallery, but only if Mona makes him a promise. And that promise is what gives her a lot of pleasure, but at the same time makes her ask a whole lot of questions.

There are a lot of hot scenes in The Red, some of them are so enticing I felt like I was there, dancing and twirling in the moonlight. Others made me cringe a little bit, because things were just so very strange… mysterious and rather taboo. I loved the whole story, though, and as always, Reisz’s way with words had me more or less spellbound from start to finish, it was impossible to put the book down.

“We’ll play games, you and I. Or I’ll pay them and you’ll play along. You won’t know realty from fantasy.” “I’ll know.” “You say that now… but I’m very good at the games I play.” This time he didn’t smile. He smirked like shed’ heard the devil does.

“They were scared,” … he countered. “A woman with power. A woman who owned her body and wasn’t afraid to sell it. That painting is art because it terrified its first viewers. Art should be dangerous, you know. It should say something to society that society doesn’t want to hear. Do you know what the opposite of art is? Propaganda. There’s too much of that in the world. Not enough art. And certainly not enough of this…”

No man had ever made her feel so much as Malcolm did. Pain didn’t cancel out the pleasure – it doubled it, trebled it.

Reading this book contributed to these challenges:

• 2017 New Release Challenge

About Linda @ (un)Conventional Bookworms

Linda is an English as foreign language teacher and has a Master's degree in English Language and Literature. She's an avid reader, blogger, compulsive one-clicker and a genre omnivore. Ever since she learnt how to read she has been seen with a book or two in her hands everywhere she goes.

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