Title : The Harlot
Author : Saskia Walker
Publisher : Harlequin
ISBN : 978-0-373-77736-5
Number of Pages : 329
Price [USD] : 14.95
Genre: Historical Romance

The blurb of the book reads like this… It is a dark era, and a lusty lass will do what she must to survive. Even if it means bartering flesh for a palmful of coins…

Forced to watch her mother burn at the stake as a witch, Jessie Taskill was separated from her siblings in the aftermath. Jessie is similarly gifted, ripe with a powerful magic that must stay hidden. When she’s accused by a rival of witchcraft, Jessie finds herself behind prison walls, awaiting certain death with a roguish priest unlike any man of the cloth she has known.

In reality, Gregor Ramsay is as far from holy as the devil himself, but his promise of freedom in return for her services may be her salvation. Locked into a dubious agreement, Jessie resents his plan to have her seduce and ruin his lifelong enemy. Especially when Gregor’s lust for her is so compelling. She may agree to be his pawn…even as she plots to use him just as he is using her.

The Harlot is an paranormal historical erotic romance. Okay, it is predominantly an erotic romance centered around sex and a revenge scheme. I have read 50 Shades of Grey and 50 Shades Darker to understand the hullabaloo  around these books, so reading The Harlot to me was just okay. This genre is not for the faint hearted, though. The first 100 or so pages had a lot of erotic scenes and the story moved at a very slow pace and the revenge plot started only after half the book was over.

The erotic scenes are simply hot! And way it is written is classy and compelling, a bit elaborative but not at all dirty. The tenderness and fierceness of the love scenes is very vivid and you can almost feel the passion between the 2 protagonists. It has all the erotic practices… light kinky stuff bondage and discipline with sadism and masochism, m/m and f/f along with m/f couplings.

The magic part was a bit lame. I think the book would had been just great without it too.

The book is hard to put down, despite the fact that the it has a lot of explicit stuff. And that’s because it is an erotic novel. So, beyond a doubt there’s going to be an emphasis on the eroticism  and which is the selling point of the genre.

Rating : 4/5