From the Riley Locke desk
Sequels that swap protagonists are auditions, and Hook, Line, and Sinker is Tessa Bailey's cast member walking off with the show. It takes the first book's designated comic relief, Fox Thornton, king crab fisherman, professional flirt, a man whose reputation in Westport arrives at parties before he does, and asks the question these books rarely risk: what if the charming one knows exactly what everyone thinks of him, agrees, and has quietly stopped hoping for a revised opinion? The desk considers the answer the best character work Bailey has done.
Hannah Bellinger arrives back in Westport for a film production job, ears permanently in headphones, building the soundtrack of a life she keeps casting herself as a supporting player in. She and Fox have been long-distance friends since the first book's events, conducting a correspondence of playlists and late-night calls that both parties have labelled platonic with increasing desperation. When work brings her to town for a month, she stays in his spare room, and the book becomes a patient dismantling of two matching self-assessments: hers, that she is background music; his, that he is a good time and nothing after. The friendship is real, which is what gives the slow burn its voltage — every escalation risks an actual loss, and both of them price it accordingly.
What the desk admires most is the book's honesty about reputation as a cage built from the inside. Fox's arc is not a rake reformed by love; it is a man learning that the version of himself he performs was a bargain struck young, and that renegotiation is allowed. Bailey writes his self-loathing with surprising bluntness for a romcom, and Hannah's steadiness — she never asks him to be different, only to be honest — is the correct key for the lock. The soundtrack motif pays off in the desk's favourite gesture of the duology.
Honest notices: readers should take the first book first for full effect, though the pairing stands alone; the middle burns very slowly for a Bailey. Heat arrives late and detonates on schedule. Content notes for self-worth struggles and a difficult parent.
Who is this for? Friends-to-lovers readers who want the friendship load-tested, playlist people, and anyone who has ever been described as fun and heard it as a ceiling. The desk recommends it with the volume up. Taken with its predecessor, the Bellinger sisters form one of the genre's best matched sets (two women, two harbours, opposite lessons), and Westport itself, all crab boats and bar-stool parliament, earns its place among romance's better fictional towns.