If you’re curious about this book, please check triggers. The author has a more comprehensive list on her website.

Hooked is a dark, contemporary mafia romance with lots of winks and nods to Peter Pan. It’s the first book in the Never After series, which is a reimagining of known fairytales and House of Mouse movies, but with villains as the love interests.

This is your common revenge story of a man wanting revenge against the heroine’s father and woos her as part of his quest for vengeance.

To sum up, Hook’s parents were assassinated by Peter…

As a teen, Hook is taken in by a local crime boss, where they run protection rackets, drug smuggling operations, and the like.

Wendy has her own issues with her father, namely that he’s pretty negligent and neglectful of her and her brother following the death of their mother. He’s also involved in criminal activity that she is blissfully unaware of.

For some reason, I have declared 2025 my dark romance era. I’ve been curious about the subgenre for awhile, though it’s been hard to weed through all of the offerings and I feel like I can make book decisions more easily when I can peruse in a physical store. Shoutout to Lovestruck Books for having a beefy dark romance section.

I found this to be a super compelling read, honestly. I blew through this bad boy in about 5 hours across two days. I loved all the Easter eggs to the source material

The romance unfolded at a great (and sexy) pace for most of the book and there’s an interesting crime mystery happening in the background.

There’s a mole in the midst of Hook and his boss Ru’s operations, while they’re simultaneously trying to broker a deal with Peter and his airline company to further their drug operations. No one knows that Hook has any former connections to Peter and Peter doesn’t remember Hook since he was a child when they last met, so there’s a tension with his subterfuge with Ru, Wendy, and Peter.

It taps well into my enjoyment of high stakes secrets. Sarah and I have talked at length about how we vary on the angst scale. A friends to lovers romance doesn’t often grab my interest because I think the obstacles are too low. Wooing a woman and brokering an illegal business deal for the purpose of killing a well-known businessman with a highly successful airline company? Thank you, sir. I will have another.

The attraction between Hook and Wendy is cute and flirtatious (you know, until he reveals his master plan and things get wild). He’s British and throws around “darling” a lot (also another Peter Pan nod). It gave me some Astarion from Baldur’s Gate 3 vibes. For the Astarion girlies out there, if you know, you know.

I wouldn’t necessarily call it a morality chain trope, as Hook expresses no desire to be “good” for the sake of Wendy, but more so that falling in love with Wendy feels like the first “good” thing he’s allowed himself to experience.

Wendy is wealthy, has lived a sheltered life under the thumb of her rich father, and has assumed the typical role of eldest daughter where she has to parent her younger brother. Her decisions are driven by wanting to establish her own agency. She gets a job despite not needing one. She goes to bars with coworkers to establish deeper friendships. She strikes up a flirtation with a mysterious Brit (Hook).

Sometimes in similar plots, there’s a heaping helping of insta-love or a love interest that skews more toward passive rather than an active participant in a relationship. Perhaps, for me, the bar is on the floor, but Wendy at least wasn’t a wet noodle. I’ll take that as a win.

Everything fell apart with about a quarter left in the book. I felt like I was enduring twist whiplash with big reveal after big reveal, plus there was an uptick in sex scenes that I mostly skimmed. The twists mostly made sense, but there were just too many in rapid succession to really let them sit and simmer.

There were also a couple things that don’t appeal to me personally as a reader.

I will note that in the book Wendy is a Massachusetts transplant from Florida (same, girl) and that threw me for a second. It’s set in a fictional town in an environment that certainly doesn’t bring to mind any of my experiences in the Bay State. There’s not a single mention of the screeching Green Line, ghost buses, or lack of blinker usage. If you’re a stickler for a detailed sense of place especially in an area where you may live, be warned that the setting is very loose set dressing.

However, I kept thinking about this book while working, waiting to finally be on my commute home or have some time on my lunch break to start reading again. I made the grievous error of buying a special edition of this book and, while there are plenty of books out in the series, the special edition of book two, Scarred, isn’t out until August. Yes, I’ve preordered it.

Considering I’ve been in a reading lull lately, Hooked gets major points for reigniting the desire to pull a Bad Decisions Book Club. It was really dirty (a compliment) and mostly fun, and I think it was a good start to my foray into newer dark romance releases this year.