Against the background of a gritty East Village reeling from AIDS and a city steeped in two decades of crime, Gillian Lamb decides to work as a “switch”—playing both the dominatrix and the submissive in one of the city’s most notorious and elegant dungeons—in order to fund her graduate studies at Yale. As she struggles to unravel the mystery of who wrote La Vie d’Odile, a sensational French pornographic novel by the pseudonymous Mireille Brodeur—the subject of her PhD thesis—this Philip Marlow in a leather miniskirt is pursued by a handsome and twisted Assistant ...
Against the background of a gritty East Village reeling from AIDS and a city steeped in two decades of crime, Gillian Lamb decides to work as a “switch”—playing both the dominatrix and the submissive in one of the city’s most notorious and elegant dungeons—in order to fund her graduate studies at Yale. As she struggles to unravel the mystery of who wrote La Vie d’Odile, a sensational French pornographic novel by the pseudonymous Mireille Brodeur—the subject of her PhD thesis—this Philip Marlow in a leather miniskirt is pursued by a handsome and twisted Assistant District Attorney; courted by a down on his luck former master of the universe with a spanking fetish; exploited by her decadent and perverse dissertation advisor; and schooled by her mentor, dominatrix Nina Laurel of the Laurel Institute of Psychosexual Studies. She learns how to deal with some of the most powerful men in the city, with paraphilias ranging from infantilism to cross dressing, bondage, and elaborate psychological torture. As Gillian gets closer to resolving the mystery of Odile, a lethal plot begins to uncoil around her, and this brilliant, determined, and deviant young woman must draw on all the lessons in power she has learned in her unconventional course of study to save herself and a group of women whose lives hang in the balance. The Switch, to be published by Italian publisher D'Agostini, is a uniquely propulsive, explicit, feminist neo-noir addition to the “coming of age in New York City” genre. Coming in 2019.