Please note that even though this is a captor/captive story, it really does not fit as a D/s story. Even though the Captor in To Capture the Captor is in control of the situation, the fact of his being in control is not necessarily part of his allure nor of the characters intrinsic chemistry. The captive is barely defiant--nowhere near the termagant. Plus he only tests the boundaries of dominating officiousness, without subjecting Itza to anything more embarrassing than the equivalent of a contemporary model on runway wearing something out of Victoria's Secret.

We are introduced to Itza, princess/widow of a "middle-aged, potbellied spoiled man" after her city has fallen to a warring king, after she has walked for days coffled to a chain of fellow hostages from her fallen city. We are, in fact, introduced to her when most of the dramatic incidents of her life are already over: she's already been given by her father to said aforementioned potbellied, spoiled crown prince of Cali; and she's already found what it is like to that same aforementioned bad husband who was a bad man who treated her badly. We meet her a mere seven paragraphs before the conqueror does.

The conqueror, King Yaque, is tall, beautiful and dressed to the nines, whatever the nines would be in this time and place. [Aztec, I would guess given the huge headdress he wears as well as the author's affinity for Aztec culture] Moreover, he notices Itza, and has her sent to the palace, where she is housed with the slave/servant Tula. Tula performs an important function; she gives Itza someone to talk to, and someone with whom she can interact and illustrate that as a royal (or former royal), she's not too high in the instep.

There are only a few steps between meeting and...well, everything else. In a story only fifty pages long, I suppose one has to cut a lot of development. Readers who choose to buy this story don't want to sit through a lot of plot development, they want to get right down to the action and interaction between the hero and heroine.

In reading To Capture the Captor, I do miss the kind of plot development that is in more traditional books. This story is fine for what it is, but in all of its fifty pages, there is not a whole lot in the way of conflict, no time for the development of angst and complex emotion, and not a lot in the way of obstacles to be surmounted. This flaw is significant to me, because there is no failure of the writer. She handles the text in a very capable fashion. The language is somewhat tempered, in the fashion of an earlier sweet romance, so that even though this can honestly be construed as erotica, if you are a reader who is offended by an explicit heroine, this book would be to your taste. Short story, quick read, something to curl up with if you don't have a whole lot of curling up time and aren't looking for the Super Dom and his super-saucy counterpart.

Reviewed by Maîtresse
© Sept 2008