ARC Review of If I Were You by Lisa Renee Jones

Title: If I Were You (Inside Out Trilogy Book #1)
Author: Lisa Renee Jones
Source: Requested
Genre: Erotic Romance/Contemporary Romance
Length: 330 Paperback pages
Reviewer: Revolutionary Riot Gyrl

He is rich and famous, and dark in ways I shouldn't find intriguing, but I do. I don't understand why his dark side appeals to me, but the attraction between us is rich with velvety promises of satisfaction. Chris is dark, and so are his desires, but I cannot turn away. He is damaged beneath his confident good looks and need for control, and in some way, I feel he needs me. I need him.

If I Were You is written in the same vein as Anne Rice's The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty's Punishment, Beauty's Release and along the lines of Story Of O and Nine and a Half Weeks: A Memoir of a Love Affair.

Sara is a complicated character with a mysterious past. In the beginning, she is a simple school teacher who, by chance, gets a hold of a series of journals written by a woman named Rebecca. This woman becomes her one true obsession to the point where she tracks down the gallery the woman worked for and eventually is hired at the same gallery doing what Rebecca did. She also gets to indulge her passion in art, which is what she went to university for, and it is within this very high-cultured world she meets Chris.

Chris is a painter and an enigma unto himself. He has a tattoo, he likes leather, he drives a Porsche and he's filthy rich. He comes from money, similar to Sara, though she lives like a pauper while he has taken advantage of his privileged background. 

There is a lot of back story and although their relationship is supposed to come down to just sex, it is all that and more from the beginning. This novel differs from the 50 Shades Trilogy and The Crossfire Trilogy as there is no incessant "thigh-clinching" or the narrator telling us ad nauseum how "hot" the bad-boy/lover of the story happens to be. There is a lot of psychological introspection in terms of who these two people really are and how they will change one another's lives.

That is not to say the sex isn't steamy and the relationship between these two is all fire and ice. It's more than just their relationship at the heart of this novel. There is a mystery Sara desperately wants to solve and there is the whole issue of Chris owning a BDSM club (a real one, not just light spanking here or there...we are talking about hardcore Bondage and Discipline, Domination and Submission, or Sadism and Masochism here...exactly what BDSM stands for).

The book leaves the reader on a cliffhanger and although this would usually make me deduct a star, this novel in itself was so satisfying; I can forgive the author for doing this to the reader. I definitely look forward to reading the ARC of Being Me, the second novel in this story.