Maestra

　　但遠遠比這些精采小說更性感、聰明而且壞到骨子裡…….
　　出版社警告：「這不是愛情故事」
　　呼喚所有喜歡刺激、不怕重口味的讀者，挑戰全新三部曲

　　With the cunning of Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne, and as dangerous as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’s Lisbeth Salander, the femme fatale of this Talented Mr. Ripley-esque psychological thriller is sexy, smart, and very, very bad in all the best ways.

　　Not since Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley has there been so piercing a portrait of someone on the outside, looking in. Meet femme fatale Judith Rashleigh. She’s a woman who knows what she wants—and exactly how to get it. A smooth confidence woman with a talent for self-invention, she’s seen inside the invisible club of the debonair and wealthy, and she knows where she belongs. Maestra is a glamorous, ferocious debut psychological thriller and the beginning of a razor-sharp trilogy.

　　I called myself Lauren again, gave the same story of a tour of Italy between jobs. For a moment, as the Vespa chugged up the steep road away from the little town, with the lake below us pink in the sunset, I rested my face against his jacket, letting my hands gently grip his hipbones, and felt a little lonely. This was how it was going to be, I thought. If I went through with this, I’d never be able to be myself again. Still, we’d never been that close.

　　Review:

　　Washington Post–: "L.S. Hilton's 'Maestra' will be one of this year's most talked-about novels, simply because of its explicit sex scenes...The good news is that the British Oxford-educated author not only writes well about sex, she writes well about everything. You could cut the sex scenes and 'Maestra' would still be a fascinating novel about a young woman on the make. It just wouldn't be as much fun...Judith may well be [a] more interesting character [than Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley]... Will Judith's dreams come true, or will her crimes catch up with her? We won't know right away. At least two more of her adventures remain, thanks to the million-dollar three-book deal Hilton has signed. (A movie is also in the works.) In other words, more mayhem, more art - and certainly more sex - lie ahead for insatiable Judith and for all those consenting adults who will delight in her endless ups and downs."

　　New York Post: "This year's most erotic novel makes Fifty Shades look like the Bible. If British author L.S. Hilton had her way, her new book MAESTRA would come with a warning label on it. "It would say, 'THIS IS NOT A LOVE STORY,'" . . . Bound to be the It beach book of the summer . . . Unapologetic, confident and quite the sociopath, protagonist Judith Rashleigh is no Anastasia Steele."

　 　Chicago Review of Books–Review–: "L.S. Hilton's new novel Maestra has been compared with Gone Girl and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. But-in addition to the lack of a 'girl' in the title-the story of Judith Rashleigh is an altogether different (though similarly mesmerizing) beast. [She] is a compelling and oddly relatable narrator. The challenges she faces as an outsider trying to break in are near-universal, particularly since she battles a male-dominated field and works against her own socioeconomic background. ... Maestra is uncharted territory for Hilton, whose earlier work includes several biographies and works of historical fiction. Here, she's crafted a taut, meaty thriller that's certainly on par with those bestselling 'girls' in terms of intrigue, surprising twists, and unputdownableness, while Judith Rashleigh's single-minded and self-centered quest for wealth and acceptance could well be the most compelling since Patrick Bateman's."

作者簡介

　　L.S. Hilton grew up in England and has lived in Key West, New York City, Paris and Milan. After graduating from Oxford she studied art history in Paris and Florence. She has worked as a journalist, art critic and broadcaster and is presently based in London.