On-Sale
Date: June 5, 2018 (Worldwide)
Genre: Erotica
/ Romantic Suspense
Page
Count: 284 pages
Blurb
As the
Jack-of-All-Wicked-Trades for a secretive French military intelligence agency,
24-year-old Lieutenant Kingsley Boissonneault has done it all—spied, lied, and
killed under orders. But his latest assignment is quite out of the ordinary.
His commanding officer's nephew has disappeared inside a sex cult, and Kingsley
has been tasked with bringing him home to safety.
The cult’s holy book is Story of O, the infamous
French novel of extreme sado-masochism. Their château is a looking-glass world
where women reign and men are their willing slaves. Or are they willing? It’s
Kingsley’s mission to find out.
Once inside the château, however, Kingsley quickly
falls under the erotic spell cast by the enigmatic Madame, a woman of wisdom,
power, and beauty. She offers Kingsley the one thing he’s always wanted. But
the price? Giving up forever the only person he’s ever loved.
The Chateau is a new standalone Original Sinners
novel from international bestseller Tiffany Reisz, author of The Siren and The
Lucky Ones.
Excerpt
The
dream always begins the same way. In the winter. In the woods.
Kingsley stands in snow surrounded by shadows. None of the
shadows are his because he’s not really there. He leaves no footprints as he
walks. He does not see his steaming breath as he breathes. He is a ghost in
this white forest, but he is not the only ghost here.
Before him stands a door.
It’s an arched wooden door alone in the woods. It belongs to an
old chapel, but there is no church here, no chapel, no house. Only a door.
Kingsley can walk around the door, but nothing will happen. Nothing will happen
at all until he steps through it. The iron latch is cold enough to bite his
bare fingers, but he doesn’t feel this either. He lifts it and passes through
the door, because that is where the boy in white waits for him.
The moon is full and high, and the snow is bright, and he can
see the young man so clearly it’s almost as if it were daytime, almost as if it
weren’t a dream at all.
The boy in the clearing is beautiful, his hair so blond it looks
almost white. His hair is white and his clothes are white, not snow white but a
purer white, a baptismal white.
Kingsley speaks a word—either the boy’s name or “sir.” When he
wakes he can never remember what word he says.
The boy, luminous in his pure white clothing, stands next to a
table made of rough stone and on the stone table is a chess board made of
ice.
Even though it is a dream, and no one has spoken but him,
Kingsley knows he is supposed to sit and stay and play the game. It’s the
rules. If he doesn’t play, he’ll wake up, and the last thing he wants is to
wake up now, to wake up ever.
He sits opposite the young man with the white-blond hair. The
chess board is between them. Everything is between them.
Kingsley moves his pawn.
“You’re not really here,” Kingsley says to the boy with the
snowy hair and the silver eyes. The boy’s beauty renders the dream a nightmare
because Kingsley knows when morning comes, the boy will be gone and nowhere
does such beauty exist among his waking hours. Not anymore.
“How do you know?” the boy asks, moving his king.
“You look eighteen,” Kingsley says, moving another pawn. “You’re
twenty-five now. I’m twenty-four.”
The boy moves his king again. “In your memory I’m
eighteen.”
“That isn’t how you play,” Kingsley says. “You can’t move the
king like that.”
“It’s my game,” the boy in white says. “I move my king however I
want. Don’t you remember?
Don’t you remember the way I moved my King anywhere
and everywhere I wanted him to go?”
Even in the snow and the cold, Kingsley grows warm.
“I remember.”
Kingsley moves his bishop.
The boy in white moves his king again.
“I don’t know how to win this game,” Kingsley says. “How can I
win if I don’t know the rules?”
The boy in white narrows his silver eyes at him. “You’ve already
won.”
“I have?”
“To play is to win, if you’re playing with me. Isn’t that true?”
the boy asks with an arrogant smile in his eyes.
Kingsley knows this is true though it galls him to admit it. He
doesn’t care who wins the game as long as the game between them goes on
forever. He moves another pawn and the boy in white captures it.
To be the pawn captured in that boy’s hand…
“How do you keep finding me?” Kingsley asks.
“You came to me,” the boy says. “I’m always here.”
“I lost you,” Kingsley says. “Seven years ago. I lost you.”
“No,” the boy says, smiling for the first time. His face is like
Michelangelo’s David, passive and powerful and carved from pale marble. His
eyes are granite and if Kingsley had a chisel he knows he could chip away at
the boy’s chest until he uncovered an iron and copper wire heart beating inside
a steel ribcage.
“No?”
“You lost you,” the boy says. The smile is gone and it has begun
to snow again. When it snows, Kingsley knows the dream is almost over. All he
wants to do is stay asleep a little longer. All he wants to do is stay asleep
forever.
“How do I find you again?” Kingsley asks. “Please, tell me
before I wake.”
“You don’t find me,” the boy says. “I find you.”
“Find me then.”
“When it’s time.”
“When will it be time?”
The boy in white moves his hands over the board and Kingsley
looks down. The ice king lays on the board broken in two pieces.
“When?” Kingsley asks. He is a child again, asking a thousand
questions in the quest for a single answer. The snow is falling harder now,
heavy as rain and hot as tears. “Tell me when, please…”
The boy leans across the board as if to kiss him, but instead of
a kiss, Kingsley is given an answer.
“When you find you.”
Between the kiss and the answer, Kingsley would have picked the
kiss.
Review
“Where she was taking him, the
women ruled the men. Considering every wound on his body, heart, and soul had
been inflicted by a man—the deepest by a boy— Kingsley couldn’t get to her chateau
fast enough.”
Nobody who has read
my blog before will be surprised when I say that I adore Tiffany Reisz and her
books. And while all her titles are fabulous, the Original Sinners series
holds a very special place in my heart. So, when I discovered there was going
to be a new story, featuring a young Kingsley, I may have squealed. The press
release describes the book as follows:
“It’s James Bond with blow jobs,
BDSM, and an angst-ridden bisexual hero still in love with his ex-boyfriend.”
And that is exactly
what this book is, a thrilling combination of angst, eroticism, tension, and
mystery. It is also the reader’s opportunity to discover exactly how, why, and
where Kingsley learned his tricks of the trade. Because the Kingsley we
encounter in this book is not yet the man we’ve got to know and love in the
first eight Original Sinners stories. Sure, the seeds are already there,
but it is in The Chateau that those seeds find fertile ground and take
proper root.
It was funny to
discover I actually have something in common with Kingsley Edge.
“He’d first read the book when he
was a boy, sneaking it from his parent’s bedroom shelf when they were out.”
I stumbled across
that book at more or less the same age as Kingsley and in exactly the same
location. And I have to admit that I was as fascinated with the story as he
was. Therefore it was a pure delight to read The Chateau and to be
transported to a place where O’s world has been turned on its head and it is women
who control and ‘use’ men.
If Søren fascinated
you in the earlier books, you’ll find, Madame, his female counter-part equally
mesmerizing. Both of them have a cruel streak that knows no bounds. Then again,
both of them are self-confessed sadists, so it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise.
“I like seeing men naked. Nothing
strips a man more naked than the things that cause him pain and the things that
make him afraid.”
And, without giving
anything away, I have to admit that Madame takes cruel to a level I’m sure Søren
would have approved of, maybe even envied. But, just like her male
counter-part, Madame operates by an ethical code. It may be one foreign to most
of us, but both of them have their limits. Even if both Søren and Madame
stretch those limits to their fullest extent. I do have to admit that at one
point, my heart shattered for Kingsley.
It’s what you’ll allow me to do
to you. If your willingness to suffer is infinite, then my capacity to hurt you
is bottomless. Do you understand?”
I could rave about
this book for another thousand words or more. Since this already is a very long
post, I’ll try to curtail my enthusiasm. Suffice to say that The
Chateau captivated me. I read it from start to finish in one afternoon
completely lost in Kingsley’s adventures and pain. If there is such a thing as
the perfect combination of sexy, thrilling, touching, and intriguing, this book
may well be where I found it.
For me this was the
book that fully fleshed out Kingsley, and as such a wonderful addition to the Original
Sinners series. If you haven’t read any of the earlier books, this may
well be the book that pulls you into the unique and addictive world Tiffany
Reisz has created. Either way, I can’t recommend this book highly enough.
And finally, I have
to admit that I’m having a hard time containing my excitement because the next
stand-alone Original Sinners title has already been announced. The title is Picture
Perfect Cowboy and will be released in October 2018. For the first time
in probably forever, I almost find myself wishing summer away. J
The
Author
Tiffany Reisz is the USA Today bestselling
author of the Original Sinners series for Mira Books and Mills & Boon,
including the RT Book Reviews Best Erotic
Romance 2012 winner The Siren and
the LAMBDA Literary Award-winning The King. Her
novel The
Saint won the Romance Writers of America RITA® for best Erotic
Romance in 2015.
About 8th Circle Press
8th
Circle Press is a Lexington, Kentucky-based publisher of literary friction. For
more information, visit our website at www.8thCirclePress.com.
