Student Judith Wilson lands a job at the Nemesis Archive, an institution dedicated to the documentation of perverse female desires, under the imperious Samantha James. Unable to accept correction at the hands of the Director, she is forced to resign. But one manuscript in particular has awoken her guilty fascination with corporal punishment, and leads her to its author and his obscure Rigorist Order in Brittany. The discipline practised there brings Judith's sexuality into a class of its own, and she returns to the Archive to bring her wayward former co-workers to heel.