Alicia’s Bet is the eighth volume in the continuing series Taking Chances. In the stories of Taking Chances contemporary women make a wager for reasons sound or unsound, impulsive or considered that, win or lose, will have far reaching impacts on their life and their relationships. In Volume Eight Dani and her housemates - Alicia, Monica, and Gloria - (Taking Chances - Volume Three: Dani’s Bet) have come to Chicago for the wedding of Dani’s older sister Emily (Taking Chances - Volume Four: Emily’s Bet) to Ian. During their stay they meet Ellen and David (Taking Chances - Volume Five: Ellen and David’s Bet), and Martina (Taking Chances - Volume Seven: Martina’s Bet) and are introduced to the BDSM club Leather & Lace. During their stay the club will hold its annual Medieval Faire. During the Faire one unlucky club member is chosen by random drawing to play the part of a medieval lawbreaker who will be jailed, tried, and punished for their crimes. Others are chosen to play parts in the drama: magistrate, bailiff, sheriff, deputies, witnesses, and the executioner who will carry out the punishments to which the lawbreaker is sentenced. Every member understands the intense, painful, humiliating public punishments that were applied to lawbreakers in Medieval England: whipping at a cart’s tail, the pillory, the whipping post, and other dreaded penalties. But they cannot stay to witness the spectacle - and play one of the principals or the part of a medieval villager - without participating in the wager and taking the risk of being chosen as the unlucky criminal. Alicia has just completed an undergraduate degree in Sociology. Her coursework included learning about the social structures of Medieval Anglo-Saxon society, including crime and punishment practices. She anxiously looks forward to the Faire. She is willing to take the chance of losing her bet and being chosen by merciless Fate as the unlucky victim of Medieval justice for the opportunity to be an eyewitness to an as-close-as-possible twenty-first century view of the criminal punishment practices she has learned about in her classes. Taking Chances - Volume Eight: Alicia’s Bet is a novel length story of about 82,000 words.
