Customer Reviews

Hotbed (Black Lace)

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I've been buying and reading every Black Lace book as they come out each month for the past five + years. In all that time there have only been three books I did not finish. This is one of them. I read half of it and then tossed it. Why?

The heroine, Natalie, is not somebody I found I could empathize or identify with. I just plain didn't like her and didn't care what happened to her. None of the other characters are interesting because their personalities are not developed. The plot is not very compelling. Natalie is a reporter hoping to expose a local businessman's hidden illicit activities, but she's actually quite a hypocrite on this score. Most of the erotic activity falls into the kinky category, with lots of men in leather masks, beatings, and the like. Perhaps if a female reader is fascinated with the idea of having a sexual relationship with a transvestite this would be just the book to read.

I loved Portia Da Costa's The Tutor and Continuum and looked forward to reading Hotbed. This is one of the most shocking Black Lace novels I've ever read. And that's the problem with this novel. I think Ms. Portia Da Costa was more preoccupied with supplying a vast amount of shock value than she was of developing the characters and situations. Natalie is one of the weakest characters Portia's ever written. A London journalist, Natalie returns to her hometown of Redwych to do an expose on a clean-cut, moralist businessman. She suspects that he lives an illicit lifestyle that could ruin his golden boy image. In doing so she discovers a world of dark, lurid and kinky games she's never before witnessed. She also discovers that her half-sister and her new crop of sexual comrades have set her up. I don't know if it's the dominant transvestite, the attraction between the two sisters or what, but Hotbed is more about perversion than sensuality. The part in which Natalie has a rather steamy encounter on a train with a pseudo-academic is the only good erotic scene in this novel. The rest just isn't worth reading. It's a shame. The Tutor was such a great novel -- what happened to this author? I sure hope that the other novel I have of hers, Shadowplay, is better than this one.

Certainly way up there in the Black Lace vein we find our heroine, Natalie in a very very dark novel entering into a new relationship with her very much liberated half sister, Patti.

And what a relationship it is as Natalie finds Patti is now the exclusive seamstress of leather and spice for the somewhat beutifull transvestite social leader of a group of very very horny people led by Stella Fontayne....

What is great about the writings of this author is that she is able to take the impossible and make it delicious as Alex Hendry, one of our happy little characters soon finds out as he submits to Stella .....

Taking outwardly normal working folk and stripping them of their mostly false modesty while they not only submit but partake in sins of the flesh is what make this book really great .....

Turning thirty and having lost her youthful innocence from too many ugly stories and too many disaffected romps, reporter Natalie leaves the light speed of London to return home to the prim and proper village of Redwych where her half sister Patti lives. On the slow mobbing train she thinks of Patti as her best friend and her most competitive opponent with each daring and double and triple daring the other to perform sexual conquests, submissions and anything in between.

However, the quiet community she left seemingly ages ago has turned into a HOTBED of depravity led by drag queen Stella Fontayne. Although Natalie swore no more men, she also needs a man. Soon she sexually competes with Patti to see who can be closest to Stella as no perversion or sexual boundaries exist for these siblings, who will try anything and do.

The sexual war between the sisters will grip erotica readers from the onset when the he-bitch congratulates Pattie as she-he loves "a woman who can make another woman come". That double entendre (along with immediate profanity that seems apropos) sets the tone of a fabulous tale of depravity as each of the sisters take turn bringing the CONTINUUM of debauchery lower and lower. Fans of character studies that look deep at how much the chit rules relationships will appreciate this fine triangular literotica in which the lead trio seems genuinely depraved.

Harriet Klausner

You have to understand, I really dig Portia da Costa's books. I haven't read one yet that I didn't enjoy. She has the ability to set up a scenario that obliges her heroine to grab hold of a problem and then to pull YOU into the action. "Hotbed" is classic da Costa. You watch with fascination and concern as she goes deeper and deeper into a increasingly ambiguous & scary situation, but you can't put the book down because it's just too Hot, just too compelling! Do yourself a favor -- read this one!