Kushiel's Dart

I received this book as a gift. It's not one I would have picked out for myself.

The character, Phedre, is identified as a child as a scion of the goddess Kushiel. This means she is a natural submissive and thus she is raised to be a submissive, BDSM-loving, Mata Hari spy. The book is built around political entrigue, but Phedre does very little to get herself into and out of dangerous situations - her role is to be helpless, gather information for her aristocratic master/pimp, and let the men she entices save her when the going gets rough.

Phedre is not a character I want to be in any way. I could not imagine myself in her place. It took until book 3 before she finally got up the nerve to take action to save herself from danger - and by then, she'd been kidnapped, sold into slavery as a concubine for a primitive warlord, and under threat of death daily.