Bound And Gagged

An examination of how sexual fantasy and pornography are policed in contemporary American culture.

Barrister Trish Maguire tackles a thirty-year-old terrorism case when distinguished biographer, Beatrice Bowman, hires her to fight a libel claim by a new ennobled member of the House of Lords who says she misidentified him as one of the terrorists who killed a busload of young children. Meanwhile, Trish's old friend, Inspector Caro Lyalt, faces an impossible decision---blow the whistle that could end a colleague's career (and jeopardize her own), or do nothing and never forgive herself. In the running for a fantastic new job within the police force, she learns that a South London crime family is paying off her biggest rival. The villains gag and suffocate anyone who tries to expose their secrets. If the allegations are false, she loses all hope of this job or any other, but if they are true and she does nothing, she'll live with the guilt forever. Trish is caught in the middle. As she and Caro help each other find the information they need, Caro's top informant is shot. Then the body of a young woman turns up in a park, bound, gagged, and suffocated with all the trademarks of a mob killing. And someone is trying to use Trish's twelve-year-old brother to force her to drop her inquiry. Picking her way through the maze of lies and threats, she brings danger terrifyingly close to herself and the people she loves. In her seventh thrilling Trish Maguire mystery, Natasha Cooper explores the full destructive power of the wrong words spoken at the wrong time.

Claire and Sean meet online and start an online relationship – they express their deepest desires to each other, and after months of Claire describing in detail her BDSM fantasy of her house being broken into and her getting tied up and used, Sean agrees.

Fifty years after Betty Friedan unveiled The Feminine Mystique, relations between men and women in America have never been more dysfunctional. If women are more liberated than ever before, why aren't they happier? In this shocking, funny, and bluntly honest tour of today’s gender discontents, Andrea Tantaros, one of Fox News' most popular and outspoken stars, exposes how the rightful feminist pursuit of equality went too far, and how the unintended pitfalls of that power trade have made women (and men!) miserable. In a covetous quest to attain the power that men had, women were advised to work like men, talk like men, party like men, and have sex like men. There’s just one problem: women aren’t men. Instead of feeling happy with their newfound freedoms, females today are tied up in knots, trying to strike a balance between their natural, feminine and traditional desires and what modern society dictates—and demands—through the commandments of feminism. Revealing the mass confusion this has caused among both sexes, Tantaros argues that decades of social and economic progress haven’t brought women the peace and contentedness they were told they'd gain from their new opportunities. The pressure both to have it all and to put forth the perfectly post-worthy, filtered life for social media and society at large has left women feeling twisted. Meanwhile, in their rightful quest for equality, women have promoted themselves at the expense of their male counterparts, leaving both genders frayed and frustrated. In this candid and humorous romp through the American cultural landscape, Tantaros reveals how gaining respect in the office - where women earned it - made them stop demanding it where they really wanted it: in their love lives. The impact of this power trade has been felt in every way, from sex to salaries, to dating and marriage, to fertility and female friendships, to the personal details they share with each other. As a result, we've lost the traditional virtues and values that we all want, regardless of our politics: intimacy, authenticity, kindness, respect, discretion, and above all commitment. With scathing wit -- and insights born of personal experience -- Tantaros explores how women have taken guys off the hook in dating (much to their own detriment) and exposes how we’ve become a nation averse to intimacy and preoccupied with porn, one that has traded kindness for control, intimacy for sexting, and monogamy for polygamy. Sorry romance. Sorry decency and manners. Long talks over the telephone have been supplanted by the "belfie." All this indicates a culture that's devolving, not evolving. And it’s only getting worse. Tied Up in Knots is a no-holds-barred gut check for the sexes and a wake-up call for a society that has decayed -- faster than anyone thought possible. It’s time to remember what we all really want out of work, love and life. Only then can we finally begin untying those knots.

The adventure, romance, and pathos that were so much a part of the silent serial during the early years of the motion picture industry have vanished from the scene of the Hollywood movie studio. The present generation neither remembers - for none was born yet - nor cares; for to them the silent serial is but a small part of the American past which might never even have existed. But to those who themselves were growing up in the pre-talkie era, when the motion picture industry itself was just beginning to unfold its wings, the silent serial was an outlet for the fancies of children and the dreams of adults. It was an action-packed, thrill-a-minute entry into the world of exciting experiences. Bound and Gagged is the story of the silent serial: its birth; its growth; its heroes and heroines; its successes and failures; and finally its demise.