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Ruby was the reason this book worked so well for me. She’s observant and outspoken, but she isn’t oblivious to the effect her words have on other people. She wants to be herself and still be loved by her father. That vulnerability gives weight to a story full of pranks, disguises and increasingly improbable events.

And yet here we are! Because somehow Tessa Bailey took a premise that should have had me rolling my eyes and transformed it into one of those books that I kept reading in one sitting.

Roxy Cumberland is barely keeping her head above water while trying to make it as an actress in New York. With bills piling up and opportunities proving elusive, she takes a job performing singing telegrams. Unfortunately for Roxy, her first assignment involves dressing up as a giant pink bunny and delivering a rather explicit song to a wealthy Manhattan lawyer on behalf of one of his former conquests.

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.