Wulf's Book Reviews

Deep End by Ali Hazelwood My rating: 4 of 5 stars Ali Hazelwood's " Deep End " had me hooked early: a Stanford platform diver, Scarlett, fighting her way back from an injury, and an Olympic-level swim captain, Lukas, whose devotion to discipline borders on devotional. When an unguarded secret pushes them into an arrangement, Hazelwood lets competence, vulnerability, and desire braid together until the romance feels truly earned. One of the novel’s most important threads is how it treats desire as something to name and negotiate. Lukas’ dominant impulses and Scarlett’s submissive curiosity are explored through explicit communication, boundaries, check-ins, and consent that stays present on the page. Their sexual exploration becomes its own kind of intimacy, a way of learning each other, and of choosing each other. I also greatly enjoyed the tenderness around recovery. Scarlett’s trauma is not a hurdle to clear so the plot can sprint on, it’s something the book sits with...

Two Can Play by Ali Hazelwood My rating: 5 of 5 stars This is a quick, spicy, unapologetically nerdy enemies-to-lovers novella, and it works because it keeps the conflict personal, specific, and relentlessly in the same room. » I am as certain of their love as I am of the binary code. « Two rival game studios get pushed into a forced collaboration, and then into a December “team retreat” at a cabin that feels like corporate captivity with snow outside and tension indoors. The heroine is a designer who cares about characters and story; the hero is all action-adventure polish, and she keeps trying to pretend their history is just professional rivalry, when it plainly isn’t. The best part is the slow re-framing of him: the silence that reads as disdain at first, then as restraint, then as something like carefulness. The chemistry is sharp, the humour doesn’t overstay its welcome, and when the emotional turn happens, it feels earned rather than dumped in at the end. My one actual “note t...

The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan My rating: 4 of 5 stars I picked up Dervla McTiernan's “ The Ruin ” wanting a modern police procedural that actually feels like police work, rather than a string of convenient revelations, and this one delivered. It’s set in Galway, it’s wintry, it’s quietly grim without being gratuitous, and it has that satisfying sense of a case tightening like a screw. Better still, it reads like a complete novel, not a “series pilot” padded with placeholders. It’s dark, yes, but it never slides into misery tourism. » I haven't seen Garda Reilly in twenty years.' And somehow that simple truth sounded more like a lie than anything else. « Cormac Reilly is a solid centre of gravity: competent, dogged, and self-aware enough to notice when the institution is trying to steer him towards the easy answer. As the “new man” in Galway (transferred from Dublin), he’s both insider and outsider, which gives the story some welcome tension. People talk to him because he’...

In Her Own League by Liz Tomforde My rating: 2 of 5 stars She’s the new sole owner of a privately financed sports team. He’s the “field manager” of the team, and for reasons that never feel proportionate, they’re antagonistic until they aren’t. After that we get a lot of workplace-propriety handwringing, plus extremely efficient lust. He: She’s my employer. This cannot be! (But she has “ thick ” legs. I’m drooling!) She: He’s my employee. This cannot be! (But I want him in my fortress of solitude. And elsewhere!) Evil advisory board: This cannot be! She’s, gasp, a woman! This is nepotism, and this job needs a man. (And even the one supposed-to-be good guy on the board literally doesn’t lift a finger to help until it’s safe, and even rewarding, to do so.) The advisory board, which the book itself undercuts early on: “ I don’t technically have to run a single decision by anyone else first. ” Yet we are still expected to treat these men as a meaningful obstacle, even when the broader cu...

The Island by Adrian McKinty My rating: 2 of 5 stars Bog-Standard Survival, Served With a Side of Pretension This is one of those “family vacation turns nightmare” survival thrillers that runs perfectly well on rails, and that’s exactly the problem: I’ve seen these rails so often that there’s no tension left in them. “The Island” isn’t badly written, and it certainly keeps moving, but it’s moving through a landscape of ideas that has been strip-mined for decades. You can almost hear the genre machinery: chase, threat, escalation, “resourcefulness”, repeat. What really sank it for me is the book’s intermittent insistence on being profound. Every now and then, the prose swells up, as if volume could substitute for insight. Chapter 24 gives us: » Civilization meant nothing here. Perhaps it had always meant nothing. There were no monsters on Dutch Island, but the beast was man, had always been man. « This is not depth, it’s a poster slogan pretending it just discovered human nature. Even...

Talking to the Dead by Harry Bingham My rating: 3 of 5 stars This was an odd, sometimes compelling, sometimes exasperating mix of police procedural and psychological thriller, and it never quite decides which one it wants to be. The result, for me, is a book that kept pulling me along, then tripping itself up. The premise is undeniably strong: a "damaged", hyper-observant detective-in-training, a grim Welsh setting, a dead girl who does not stay neatly dead (at least, not in the way the narrative wants her to), and a mystery with enough hooks to keep the pages turning. When Bingham focuses on the investigation, the novel has that familiar genre satisfaction: clues, reversals, institutional friction - albeit with a slightly skewed angle that separates it from the more straightforward, momentum-first crime writing I usually enjoy. » I tell him that there’s one man dead, and four others, who might or might not be dead by the time help arrives. « My main problem with this novel...