Introduction
They are blessed with everything, this small segment of lucky women who bask in the glow of affluence, education, wealth, social distinction. Life for them is a magic carpet woven of rich experience. Yet one tragic flaw, one pull of the thread, can easily deface the perfect pattern of their lives. Consider our heroine, Catherine-"Carrie"-Ann Kelly, a Vassar graduate with everything in her favor. . .everything that is, except the physical love of her husband.
Ironic, too, that a woman's fear of her own sensual nature is often relieved by the recreation of violence responsible for her abnormal anxieties. Such is the case with Carrie, daughter of a staunch Irish Catholic Senator who took out his political frustrations in the bedroom. From childhood to womanhood, the ears of Carrie's memory echo with her mother's frantic cries of pain on the other side of the bedroom wall. Sensual yet timid, the freckled-nosed woman guards her virginity like a precious jewel until marriage when he discovers it is nothing but a cheap rhinestone . . . worthless and disappointing.
As the wife of a professor of South African history, an advocate of white supremacy, Carrie is automatically the target for Berkeley radicals who raise their fists in a cry for racial equality. Fast moving and unfortunately but necessarily violent is the account of the delicate woman who one sunny day in October is kidnapped from campus, held captive in a condemned building and repeatedly violated in every way possible by her terrifying abductors.
In the face of a potentially shattering experience it is Carrie's victory over her delicate psyche and the limitations of her own sensual nature that carry her through this explosively experience a healthy, psychologically well-adjusted wife, capable of satisfying her husband in the ways that often count most.
-The Publishers