This is the story of four slaves - Brian, Claudia, Sharon and Robert - who all have an inherent need to be "owned" in the fullest sense of the word. We follow their journey as they are trained in a crash course by Alex, Grendel and Chris.
Basically, The Marketplace is a secret society catering to those who wish to own well-trained slaves and those who wish to be sold as slaves. When we're talking about a slave in this context, we're talking about one with no limits.
I'm ambivalent about this book for a number of reasons. Firstly, if this was reality, the training provided in this book would be utilised by owners who can't be bothered training their own slaves and who want to buy one off the shelf. To me, that takes the dominant's authority away from them - isn't half the pleasure of owning a slave knowing that you've trained them yourself?
Secondly, there is a huge amount of sex in this book. I'm no prude and I don't have a problem with sex, but BDSM is not all about sex. If you want a lot of sex scenes mixed in with punishment, then you'll love this. But to me, it misrepresents what real-life BDSM is about and enforces the "kinky sex" stereotype that a lot of people seem to have about BDSM.
Thirdly, the grammatical and typographical errors throughout are horrendous. I don't know what device was used to type The Marketplace, but repeatedly mis-spelling "circumstance" as "circomestance" could easily have been corrected in most modern word processors. There are other oft-repeated and very annoying grammatical errors, which drove me to distraction. I admit that I'm fairly picky about things like this and I can live with a few errors, but this book is riddled with them.
However, I found this an interesting read overall. It is more than just a bunch of sex and BDSM scenes and it has a storyline.