A review by kala_b_reviews
Playing for the Dark by Tilly Ridge

adventurous dark funny mysterious slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

3.5

First thing I will say about this book is that I love the why choose aspect to this, and I especially love the representation. Seldom do we see 1 character from an underrepresented community be part of the why choose but in this story, but we get to see a curvy FMC, a fully out bi football player, 1 newbie bi, Mexican quarterback and then the last one is a mystery (for now 😉). I honestly had no idea that there was this much representation in this book. I really just saw that it was a sports, mafia, why choose romance by an amazing human being of an author and picked it up!

Now don’t come for me when I say this, but, I feel like there was a bit too much smut in this book and not enough/not strong enough character development (if you read that sentence and stoped reading my review to pick up the book solely because there’s too much smut, I love you for that!!!). These characters had rich backgrounds but with the amount of pages there was in this book, I wish we would have centered each couple of chapters on developing each character before we got to the goodies. I also wish there was a little more tension or something more to it. I’m surprised that Ellie doesn’t realize who her stalker is just based on the name he calls her…and also, what happened to the ex boyfriend stalker aspect? Not sure if this will be explored in the next book but I was actually really hoping they would do something with the ex…for the drama!! I needed something more from this book and that’s exactly what I was hoping for: drama!