I really enjoyed this, on multiple levels. It is one of the best romances I read in 2016. The writing is wonderful. The story is complex and nuanced. The way these characters navigate power, privilege and consent in their BDSM is lovely. Their relationship is so damn swoony, and I was rooting for them almost all the way (I had a couple of reservations, which I go into in the next paragraphs). 
 This is a cross-class relationship that is all about navigating intense class and political divides, and I deeply enjoyed it's engagement with these things as real, complex, thorny, tangled, and perhaps impossible things to navigate. The way they get resolved broke my heart a bit, I need to say, which made it somewhat difficult for me to enjoy the swooniness of the happy ending. 
 Another thing that made it difficult for me to fully commit to the ending: Late in the story, one of the love interests both thinks and says some transphobic things. He is corrected by the other love interest on the part of it that he verbalizes. Then the moment passes by, as if his transphobia is expected and normal and really nobody should have issue with the fact that not only did he say something transphobic but he also considered using threats to out a working class criminalized sex worker's transness as a lever to manipulate that person to get something he needed. Gotta say, I was less enamored of him as a love interest after that, especially since he supposedly was all about being principled. I guess I was supposed to be ok with it because he decides not to overtly say it to the trans person and saves his transphobic remarks for his lover? Or is it somehow supposed to be romantic, because the thing he needed had to do with his lover? (Ugh to that. Not my kind of romance.) 
 Trigger Warnings: (view spoiler)[ A good portion of the plot is driven by both anti-kink hatred and self loathing on the part of one of the characters. This is textually challenged, and resolved in a way that worked for me as someone who has dealt with a lot of this in my own life. As I mentioned above, there is some transphobia, some of which is challenged. The transphobia felt gratuitous, though the correction was kind of nice to read. Also, these are deeply closeted queer characters who are constantly aware of and frequently discuss how their queerness is criminalized, and work hard to pass as straight. This book has a central character who is basically a police officer falling for a central character who is a criminalized revolutionary, and so it is chock full of the things you might expect, violence, criminalization, execution, police brutality, the enactment of fascist policing laws. It goes into particular detail about the criminalization of poverty and the vulnerability of homeless and poor people in the face of both state power and the individual power of aristocrats. (hide spoiler)]