Juliet Cooper is in Food PR (again with the strange jobs), and she's very good at it. After getting her heart broken by her loving but gambling addicted ex-boyfriend, she's been bed hopping for the last four years. But lately, she's been finding that it's all getting to be the same.
Her best friends are Gillian, who's miserably trying to rebuild a sexless marriage and Mel, a dominatrix. Neither of them are entirely helpful. Gillian only wishes she has Juliet's problem, while Mel declares, with a mixture of mockery and triumph 'You're burnt out.'
This book starts out as Sex in the British City, and the cocaine, BDSM, and endless cocktails come dangerously close to that kind of shallowness that says more about the author's desire to be controversial than the characters themselves.
It's particularly obvious in how the men are treated and portrayed. For much of the book, they're objects, something to fuck, or complain that you're not fucking. It's even more extreme in Mel's case. It's the trick of turning sexism in the opposite direction and calling it feminism, regularly used by women who still have a lot to learn.
But towards the end of the book, we get a hint that perhaps Henderson, and through her, Juliet, is beginning to grow a clue. A few men step forward and reveal a glimps of their humanity.
But ultimately, for a book all about men and relationships, it only scrapes the surface of the truth of both: that men and women are human, complex, emotional and a continuous work-in progress, and a healthy relationship can only exist when everyone involves respects that.
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