Review: Batting Cage – Crawford Rhine

Brand is a marked man in a world of unmarked men. The mark identifies him as someone who is eligible to go into Service. He has been ready for this opportunity for years and thinks it will never happen. Brand moves on with his life until he receives a call from a Master, Trent Parks. He turns out to be a well-known professional baseball player and unlike anyone Brand has ever met. There is an age difference that Brand has to negotiate, being the older one, as well as the dangers of being with a famous person. Brand discovers, much to his surprise, that not only does he like Trent as a Master, but he is falling in love with him.

Series: The Master and Servant Series, #1
Release Date: November 15th 2014
Publisher: eXtasy Books
Source: Manic Readers
Reviewer: Kenna
Rating:

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Reviewer’s Thoughts

1.5 Cocktails

Let me start by saying that I’ve never read anything like “Batting Cage”.  I read the blurb and thought it sounded interesting, so I picked it up, and…I wanted to like it.  Really.  I just couldn’t.

In the future, male and female societies have split.  There is still procreation, of course, but if the baby is a girl, she stays with her mother.  Likewise boys stay with their fathers.  This also means that men have sex with other men (and I assume that women have sex with women).  In this world, there are “servants”.  Men who are purchased by other men to, well…service them.  They even arrive at their destinations in cages.  Brand is a servant who has been sent to Trent, a professional baseball player.  They hit it off very well, and their Master/servant relationship takes off.  What I really mean by that is that the back to back to back sex scenes take off.  Look, I LOVE sex scenes, but, “Batting Cage” has so many that my head began to swim and I even skimmed a few of them.

If I hadn’t committed to read this book for a review, I would have just put it down and walked away in a creepy sort of disgust.  In this particular world, not only is there a lot of sex, but there is a lot of threesome sex.  Servants do what their masters want them to do, and if that includes bringing in another man, then so be it.  Once again, I love a good threesome scene, but the first one in this book involves Brand, Trent, and…Trent’s FATHER.  I’ve read a lot of triad stories where two brothers share a woman, but sharing someone with your FATHER?  Especially when this particular father put me in the mind of a greasy predator who hangs out at playgrounds during recess.  Disclaimer:  This guy does not really do that, but that’s just the vibe that I got from him.
The scene made me feel physically sick to my stomach, and I just couldn’t read the whole thing.  I had to move to the next chapter.  Through the rest of the story, Brand has sex with no less than five men.  There’s even a really bad situation where Trent’s Dad, the skeezy one, brings two drunken guys to the house while Trent is at an away game and decieves him into convincing Brand to have sex with him.  Of course Dad (and I use that term very loosely) didn’t mention that he was drunk, and so were his buddies.  You can imagine what happens.  Brand is attacked by the three men and forced to have sex with them.  Again, I had to skim to the next chapter.

Anyway, you can clearly see that I did not like this book at all.  I hate to say that.  I always try to find some sort of redeeming quality about a story, but even the editing on this one was bad.  I definitely do NOT recommend this one.  I’m sorry.