Review - A Bit of Rope by Johannes T. Evans

The blurb for this book is pretty spot-on, so I’ll use it for a change:

An ex-soldier, Arthur “Kuhn” Conrad, now a debt collector of sorts for a corrupt company, can’t sleep one night, and as he’s walking the streets, sees a coworker - on a whim, he follows, and ends up in an underground club. The older man, Ignatius Kasovitz, likes to tie people up, it seems, and Kuhn finds he wants to try being tied up, if it’s Kasovitz doing the tying.

This short novelette is set in London shortly after the end of World War II. Kuhn, as he is called throughout the story, feels a bit like a psychopath. He can inflict pain and even kill with very little emotional response. The army put that to good use and turned him into a killing machine for operations deep behind German lines. When the war ended, Kuhn ended up working as a debt collector for a very shady company.

The story is told entirely from Kuhn’s point of view. He seems aware of his rather disturbing personality and even makes use of it to keep people at a distance. Kuhn also seems to be asexual, so while the main theme of rope bondage may be kinky, there’s no actual sex described in the story. The heat level for this book is practically nil.

We only get to know Kasovitz through Kuhn’s eyes. We don’t really get to know much about him other than that he is gay and escaped from Europe before the war. He definitely seems to respect Kuhn’s boundaries, although pushing them just a tiny bit.

“A Bit of Rope” is available from Smashwords.