Madame X

Starred review from August 31, 2015
Wilder (Alpha) pulls out all the stops for this spellbinding novel of identity, passion, and fear. Madame X, the star employee of Indigo Services LLC, never leaves her Manhattan condo; clients come to her. Her job is to imbue young, entitled scions with the refinement and style they will one day need in order to command the reins of their fathers’ international businesses. Multibillionaire Caleb Indigo has kept X as a slave for the six years since he found her bleeding from near-fatal injuries that also destroyed her memories. Though Caleb promises to keep her safe from her would-be killer, his dominance of X frequently crosses the line into assault. She bravely identifies Caleb’s abuse and her own Stockholm syndrome, hungering for “a breath taken in privacy, a word spoken without ulterior motive,” but when charming entrepreneur Logan Ryder offers her a chance at a normal life, she has no idea how—or whether—to accept. The intense, violent, erotic story is told in the first-person voice of X herself, with impressively well-handled second-person passages directed at her often odious clients (“You quiver. You want to bluff, you want to bluster”). This narrative device smoothly guides the reader between X’s internal monologue and her professional facade, never feeling contrived. Once readers fall into X’s story, they’ll be desperate for the next installments. Agent: Kristin Nelson, Nelson Literary Agency.