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Abby Jimenez seems to understand that falling in love is rarely the most complicated part of a relationship. The best romance writers are interested in everything that makes love difficult to act upon: illness, grief, family obligation, financial pressure, bad timing and the habits people develop while trying to survive. In The Night We Met, Jimenez adds loyalty to that list, then asks how noble loyalty remains when protecting one person begins to harm everyone else.

Make Me ended up being my favourite book in the entire Broke & Beautiful series, not because it's the most original, or the most complex. But because what it does do is give us something that romance novels often chase but don't always manage to achieve: absolute conviction.

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.