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At first, everything feels reassuringly familiar. April Masterson appears to have built the sort of life many people quietly aspire to. She has a successful baking channel on YouTube, a beautiful home, a husband with a respected career and a place at the centre of her suburban community. She's the mother who bakes for school events, organises fundraisers and always seems to know the right thing to say. Then the anonymous text messages begin.

Every now and then a book comes along that makes you wonder whether you've been telling yourself the wrong stories about your own life.

As someone who has never read any of Liz Tomforde’s Windy City novels, I went into this one with absolutely no idea what to expect, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that this is an incredibly emotionally intuitive and thoughtful book.

Darrow enters this novel in a position of weakness rather than strength. Despite everything he achieved at the Institute, he remains trapped between worlds. He's neither fully Red nor fully Gold. He belongs everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. That tension has always sat at the heart of the series, but Golden Son sharpens it into something far more psychologically compelling. Darrow is no longer simply trying to survive among the Golds.

One of the strengths of this series has always been its ability to balance romance with political intrigue, and The Night Prince expands both elements considerably. The mythology surrounding the God of Night, the Heart of the Moon, and Aurora's own heritage becomes far richer here, giving the story a larger scope than the more contained conflict of the first novel.

Ali Hazelwood has built an entire literary empire out of highly intelligent women, emotionally constipated men, and workplaces vibrating with unresolved tension, and Two Can Play slides neatly into that lineage. This time, though, the setting shifts from laboratories and academia into the world of video game development, painted as a landscape of crunch culture, professional rivalry, creative obsession, and people surviving almost entirely on caffeine and bad sleep schedules.