As Francesca » (REPRINT)

Elaine, ambitious and hardworking, plays by the rules at the office so well that she's on the brink of an impressive promotion. But in the cyberspace world she visits every night as "Francesca," her daytime self disappears. On-line, her cool mastery gives way to abject obedience as the mysterious "Inez" seduces her into demeaning—and irresistible—sexual adventures. When a careless mistake destroys the barrier between virtual reality and her corporate life, Elaine perceives a disturbing connection between her nightly degradation and her professional success. As she becomes obsessed with finding her real-life paramour, her speculations about Inez's true identity quickly run wild, and soon all of her once-innocent encounters with friends and colleagues are charged with sexual overtones.

In a darkly comic, highly erotic tale for our time, Martha Baer captures the allure of anonymous cybersex and the elusiveness of gender identity in a world where the real and the virtually real become almost indistinguishable.

Mary Elizabeth Williams

With so many harbingers of snooze-inducing trendiness in Martha Baer's new erotic mystery, it's remarkable that as much true blue good stuff manages to peep out as it does.

Given a premise like this, it's hard not to lapse into eye-rolling from the get-go. As Francesca is the debut novel from a Wired magazine editor -- the book was also serialized in HotWired -- about Elaine, a woman who's involved in a torrid (please, say it's not) online (oh God, it is) affair with a cruel mistress who plunges her into the seamy world of S&M cybersex. By day, Elaine is an assertive, confident young office worker on her way to a promotion. At night, she logs on to her computer "as Francesca" and assumes the identity of horny slave. Her phantom lover, "Inez," may not be what she appears, either -- maybe she isn't really a woman at all. (Hey, is this that gender swapping all the kids are talking about?) Maybe she's even someone our heroine knows from her professional life. The book's groaningly Freudian thesis? That Elaine learns to get on top in her real life through being submissive in sexual fantasy.

This subject matter makes As Francesca feel immediately faddish and dated. (If it had been written 20 years ago, it would have been about disco.) And yet for all its almost painful obviousness (you figure out who "Inez" really is very early on), "As Francesca" is a meticulously stripped-down snapshot of a certain time and place, and it's also an elaborate study in loneliness and confusion. "How could you let a genius like that, whose orders and caresses gave you not just pleasure, not just your standard corporeal rush, but on top of all that gave you power -- how could you let someone like that simply drop out of your future?" Elaine asks, and suddenly you realize she's not some nerd who needs a modem and dirty talk to get off; she's a woman who's so painfully unsure of who she is that she needs a stranger to tell her.

As Francesca manages to treat all of its stray characters -- gay people and straight people, S&M practitioners and corporate climbers -- with a quirky, matter-of-fact respect. Baer may not be saying much that's new, but she does say it with great sincerity. As a tale of "empowerment," this novel is about as satisfying as a Lifetime original production, but as a story of longing for a love, longing for a life, it does just fine. Baer taps into emotions that are the same whether they're typed on a screen or whispered in an ear. -- Salon