The Heiress Hunt

Not nearly as good as the second book in the series. It wasn't bad but I just don't love the characters as much, and the childhood friends to lovers bores me.

I've only read one other book by Shupe that I enjoyed, but this one didn't do it for me as much. I'm usually all for a childhood friends-to-lovers trope, but I didn't love how Harrison went about it. He essentially goes to Paris, where he amasses a great fortune while sleeping around to spite his family and because of something he overhears Maddie say. His ploy to take revenge on his family and break up an engagement between Maddie and the Duke was just too conniving for me. I didn't doubt his feelings towards Maddie; I just wished he went about his actions differently. The first half of this worked so well for me, but the second half flopped. Still, I enjoyed Shupe's writing style and all the side characters and will pick up the other books in the series.

4/5 Stars ** I received this as an E-ARC from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for my honest review, Thank you!** I really enjoyed this book. This is a friends to lovers romance. I enjoyed watching Harrison and Maddie come to terms with their feels for each other. While I did Enjoy Harrison, I will admit he has more of a tendency to act first and ask later. I know that the romance suffered because of it. I also wasn't the biggest fan of the reason they had to get together in the first place. Everything felt a little rushed. I wanted to take some time and just enjoy the characters being after realizing their feelings. Overall I still enjoyed it and would recommend it.

So I think I read this in a not great mood. It was hard to get lost in a world of the rich, especially after falling so in love with Shupe's previous series which had a thread of social justice woven into the stories. Here, we have a rich heiress tennis player who must marry her childhood friend or be ruined (and ruining her engagement to a British Duke). Harrison Archer, our scoundrel, has been pining for Maddie forever, but after hearing her say something that devastated him at her coming out ball, he left to cat it up in Europe, but has now returned determined to make her his wife. Oh, and to ruin his family along the way. Harrison reminded me a bit of Jay Gatsby, and not in a great way. There were a lot of loose threads and plot points, including a mystery about who is trying to throw Maddie off her tennis game, and ultimately this book read more soapy than romantic to me. The characters get married quite quickly in the early parts of the novel and the story swerves to focus on the revenge plot, and lies, to move forward. That said when Harrison and Maddie are exploring their attraction to each and are on page falling in love, those scenes sent me. And the scenes were he's trying to seduce her. Wowser meowser. Uneven, but I still devoured the whole thing because I'm an avowed Shupe fangirl. Thank you to Avon for the ARC