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"Doctor's Orders" by Parker (sex slavery) 10, 5, 2
"Doctor's Orders" by Parker. Guest review by Fiddler. Jacqueline Astor has a medical practice in Southern California complete with billing to insurance companies. Actually, however, she is a non-M.D. hypnotist. Her side line is kidnapping comely women, hypnotizing them into becoming sex slaves, and shipping them off to Mexico as performers at stag shows. Her receptionist is an FBI agent on her track. The previous receptionist having found out too much is kept in a back room as the doctor's private sex (really torture) slave. Her new patients (mother and daughter) have just arrived in town, and are hiding out from an abusive ex. Then everything comes together. Parker gives us two endings. As usual with Parker, the language skills and timing are excellent. (Although the disclaimer substitutes "discrete" for "discreet.") There is plenty of sex, but the emphasis is on how horrifying or degrading that sex is to the victims. The problems come in the relationship to reality. Taking respectable women and girls and turning them into sexual performers for audiences of other races may be a source of horror (or glee, if you are built that way). The economics of the situation doesn't add up, however. Commercially, starting with prostitutes is both cheaper and safer. If non-MDs could bill insurance companies, I'd do it myself. The police work is laughable. (New FBI agents do not do undercover operations without backup; if an agent goes missing, the supervisor doesn't mourn, he orders the phone records of the place from which the agent disappeared; suspecting that a villain engages in the white-slave traffic is not a reason to overlook practicing medicine without a license and mail fraud--just the opposite.) If a hypnotist could force a subject to have sexual desire from one key word and orgasm from another word (in one session yet), she could make her fortune curing the Kims of this world of nail-biting; she wouldn't need to risk tangling with the FBI. This was a well written example of an implausible genre. Ratings for "Doctor's Orders" Athena (technical quality): 10 Venus (plot & character): 5 Fiddler (appeal to this reviewer): 2 |