If you love New York, and reading about hot sex, this collection is for you. Vibrant and sexy, but frequently moving and sometimes awfully bittersweet, these stories have memorable characters from various walks of life that offer a very different guide to their Big Apple.

The Blurb: This city-based series of outstanding erotica stories takes a bite out of the succulent Big Apple. A banquet of seduction, sin, kink and decadence has been specially prepared by top connoisseurs from the American erotica world for the delectation of your imagination. Brand new stories from Thomas S Roche, Michael Hemmingson, Shanna Germain and many other literary talents, are collected here to specifically celebrate and eroticise New York. All brought to you by the editor of the bestselling Mammoth Book of Erotica series. Cities are not just about monuments and museums and iconic places, they are also about people at love and play in unique surroundings.

The Review: This is a wonderful collection of erotic stories from Xcite Books, in which the city naturally plays an integral part, reflected in the very nature of the prose of each tale.

I loved the sprawling unpredictability of each piece, like a foreign film, you never quite know what’s going to happen next, with some tales ambling along detailing mere experiences, while others had twists in the tale and lessons learned along the way.

There’s plenty of darkness here, with hot exciting sex but also bittersweet anguish, haunting nostalgia, and no guarantee of a happy ending.

I particularly enjoyed “The Same Fifty Taxis”, a great love story between a couple meeting only occasionally through the years; “Woman in White”, a sizzling story of obsession; “Sophia in Astoria”, a hauntingly erotic story about a lost friend/lover; and “Cell”, a twisting, surprising story of same-sex experimentation.

Though I’d perhaps give one or two of these stories three or four stars rather than five, the anthology was all wonderfully readable, complex, sophisticated and entertaining, casting a beautifully eclectic look at the grown-up underbelly of this well-loved metropolis, from the eyes of some very different yet engaging characters.

n.b. The publisher seems to have split this collection up into four volumes on Amazon’s Kindle marketplace. This review applies to the full collection.