If there ever has been a book you shouldn't judge by its cover, this is it. But you'll understand that only after you've read it.
For now, just imagine this: You go through life thinking you know who you are, then one day you find out you don't know a damn thing.
With a Scotch in hand and his mind in neutral, a middle-aged man who has grown numb to life surfs the Internet. Suddenly he stumbles across an image that stops him dead in his tracks. It makes no sense to him. It's insane, but the longer he stares at the mysteriously beautiful young woman on the screen the more certain he becomes that he must meet her. He doesn't know why but the pixels on the screen hold the key to opening the doors to his prison of hopelessness, his declining sexuality, a growing list of failed relationships, and a deepening well of loneliness.
He also knows instinctively that letting that image take up residence in his imagination risks destroying a relationship that has allowed him to, at least occasionally, pretend life was tolerable.
Although it is the image of the woman — beautiful, unblinking, regal — that initially transfixes him, his eye afterwards chances on a handful of words on the Internet page. She is a dominatrix.
The word triggers something inside him, blows the dust off fantasies trickling back to adolescence, and slowly begins to re-choreograph his decades of sexual memories. Was he ever really the dominant male he thought he was? Did he have a sexual alter-ego? Was this the last card he had to play in life? Desperate to feel alive again before time runs out, he vows to find out, even if it kills him.