This is book 4 in a series (Salcious Players Club), a contemporary age gap romance about an F/m relationship between a 34 year old and the 22 year old son of her business partner. Despite the relationship being a bad idea for numerous reasons even outside of a 12 year age difference, Maggie and Beau just can’t seem to ignore their shared attraction.
I really wish they had. The book is terrible. The couple is never convincingly able to sell themselves as functional together or even having much in the way of plausible chemistry, and the plot twists and sex scenes are not only about as erotic as a yeast infection, they are as mundane as one too. Its biggest achievement is to simultaneously be as generic as possible about the sex, yet the characters behave like no human being I have ever met.
We know we are off to a great start when we meet our female lead. Despite being the co-owner of a sex club focused on BDSM/dating app, she is not into overt sexuality, or to the best of her knowledge, kink. But, in the spirit of eating her own dog food, she’s finally wheedled into taking a sex quiz, that helpfully tells her she’s dominant. Sorry, specifically a Mistress and a Brat Tamer.
Following this infallible sorting process, our heroine, faced with all the men on this kinky dating app, chooses the one who filled out his profile huffly saying he thought this was all stupid. This interest is pretty inexplicable, but it doesn’t stop the male lead from sending rapidly escalating, cringe sexts, which she turns down, but then invites him to a date at the club she owns. Sure, it’s her workplace and she is super insecure about all of this or anyone finding out she’s even exploring things, but what better place to kick things off?
It’s only after a first hookup does she realize who Beau actually is, tried to break up, but since Beau gives minimal resistance to the idea, she goes along with it anyway. She also immediately offers to let him stay at her house whenever he needs.
Which follows one of the major writing silliness. Maggie is supposed to be a type A over achiever with some relatable body insecurities. Instead she’s a doormat the male lead of the previous book orders around while she quietly resents him. Rather than any capacity to take charge, she repeatedly shows she can neither set boundaries at work or with the male lead. She’s also written as a mewling insecure mess in a ham handed effort to make her a relatable audience insert, but this of course doesn’t stop the narrative descriptions from such cliches as mentioning her “heels clinic on the floor”. They were going for an uptight, ball busting career bitch, instead she has vibes of bag holding patsy.
Beau, on the other hand, is a serial tantrum thrower (yikes) who can’t hold down a job. He is also several times over a creep, which is supposed to be him being a brat, but instead is a constant rather tedious tendency to grab Maggie by the throat or boss her around. Again, I think the author thinks that this is supposed to be affirming and self sure masculine desire that Maggie is supposed to take comfort in, but the heroine’s perception of her own precarity are not a good match for what was supposed to be taking a fuckboy in hand and taming him. The only thing I can credit is that he is plausibly pretty childish.
Nevertheless, much effort is made to establish that Beau isn’t as violent and dangerous as he is frightened of being (just starting constant needless verbal fights), but the behavior he exhibits codes more as mentally unwell, and the solution being spanking not therapy ends up more codependent than power exchange.
Choosing to write that Maggie has zero experience only further undermines her. Most of her exploration is directed by her coworkers and on top of the non-consensual neck grabbing I flagged, the book finds two different occasions in the story for her to sub outright. Something tells me the proceeding book, also age gap but with an M/f couple, did not feel the need to have the dominant switch.
I just don’t think Cate trusts readers can identify with a dominant, which is frank self sabotage. After a while it also becomes pretty clear they don’t know the difference between D/s and topping/bottoming either, when sensory exploration has to be done in a sub role and the negotiations scenes not doing a good job of setting the distinction between rules for fun and limits. This is particularly flaggable because it repeats that terrible problem that the sub gets magic inviolable limits, but the dominant is subject to whatever and it’s on them to dominate the sub not to behave poorly.
There’s a lot of books with this setting premise, a group of rich people go in together on owning a BDSM club, and rather than being a somewhat fraught investment in a marginalized community, it is a smashing, high class success. All while the kink within is almost always incredibly mild and introduced in each book with lavish attention to check lists and safewords. Readers always get a little BDSM 101 lesson whether they need it or not, and backs are patted by how liberating and above board all this is.
This lecturing almost always is wildly at odds with the behavior of the characters, who are always excessively enmeshed in each other’s personal lives, and more often than not, making rookie mistakes. The casual wealth, rather than being wish fulfillment, are just another layer of ick. Here it’s particularly egregious. For extra drama, the female lead from the prior book (22 year old, marrying the male lead’s 40 something dad after having dated the male lead) comes to scold the male lead he needs to be nicer to his dad. This is played as her maybe having a point. Ditto the female lead has a conversation with the male lead of the last book where she drops, casually that she actually initially hated Beau for not wanting as much contact with his dad initially
Of course, being scrupulously fair, age gap is already not my kink, so I was hoping to try to give it the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, among many other dubious achievements, it falls into my belief that when there’s a significant gulf in age it’s not that the younger party is ever mature for their age, it’s always that the older person isn’t. Maggie is a mess and no amount of interminable epilogues makes things better. About the only comfort is that we hear Maggie flat out refuses to marry the male lead when he asks so you can head canon their eventual break up.
Nevertheless, Mercy also fails as a bad book, in that there’s never any moment it’s particularly amusing in it’s terribleness. It is the literary equivalent of buying one of those craft kits from Walmart that are prompting to teach you to crochet a penguin or cross stitch a teapot. All the parts are technically there, but the materials and provided pieces are such poor quality the promise on the box will never deliver that outcome.
Where to Buy:
Author’s Website
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