Sex Crimes - Softcover

Jenefer Shute

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099268183 ISBN 13: 9780099268185

Publisher: Minerva, 1998

Synopsis

Walking a very fine line between fantasy and reality, Christine Chandler describes a series of sexual encounters and an ever-growing erotic obsession that leads from a New Year's Eve pick-up to an irrevocable act of horrifying violence. 40,000 first printing.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Praise for Jenefer Shute's Life-Size:

"Beautiful, terrifying and marvelously written. The miracle of Life-Sizeis its transcendence of its subject, so that it becomes a novel about the humanneed to control the uncontrollable world, or makes us ask ourselves thosenecessary questions: What is the self? And if we lost it, how can we find itagain? This luminous, horrifying and elegantly written book about a womanstarving in both mind and body is absolutely unique."
--Susan Fromberg Schaeffer

"This novel may be brutal, but its rewards are many. Shute writes withvividness and bleak wit, and does not allow us the easy way out...Atranscendent work of fiction."
--Washington Post

"Chilling...Shute brilliantly captures the torment and self-loathing of abody-obsessed person."
--People
Copyright ©Copyright © by Jenefer Shute

From Kirkus Reviews:

After making waves with her 1992 debut, Life-Size, the chronicle of an anorexic, Shute returns with a different, no less discomfiting tale of obsession, this time involving a woman so hopelessly in love that she blinds her erstwhile boyfriend. The deed is done before the story opens, with Christine Chandler, tagged in the tabloids as the Boston Fury, telling her own version of events for her lawyer's benefit as her trial looms. A driven 38-year-old attorney (Harvard Law, magna cum laude) specializing in immigration cases, Chris has never had much luck with relationships; when the much younger Scott, an unsuccessful ex-musician turned fledgling photographer, comes on to her at a New Year's Eve party, at first she doubts he'll be any different. She takes him to bed anyway, then calls him up to arrange future encounters in which body language does most of the talking. It isn't long, then, before they're seriously involved. But there's a problem, of course: Scott's live-in, who just happens to be on a yearlong assignment in Seoul. He still calls her regularly, making Chris insanely jealous, and after a few flare-ups followed by desperate reconciliations, the sex gets rougher, the rules get bent, and she discovers that both her self-esteem and her control are gone. Numb but still functioning, she moves to protect herself after a particularly brutal night, but one last confrontation in her apartment is still to occur--and the jury will be out a long time determining who was to blame for what eventually happened. While the effort to get inside the head of one so disturbed at times seems heavily stylized and clinical, there's no denying that this sexy fable of modernity exposes emotions that many might rather ignore. (Literary Guild and Doubleday book club selections) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Minerva
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0099268183
• ISBN 13: 9780099268185
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192