King of Sloth

An heir who has spent his adult life declining to want anything is standing in a hospital corridor in Bogota, being handed a company.

A romp was billed and a grief novel is underneath it. The packaging offers a charming heir and his exasperated publicist, and the delivery is a book about somebody who has been coasting since a fire, because coasting is what you do when caring about an outcome has already cost you once.

The charm has to be a defence or Xavier is unbearable. He is rich, idle, effortlessly liked, and either that frictionlessness reads as a lid on a specific wound or he is a wealthy man with no problems being indulged for four hundred pages. Huang gives the reader no third way to take him.

The boardroom and the bedroom keep different time, which is where the book strains. An inheritance condition imposes a five-year corporate deadline and a decision about a company. The romance needs slowness, privacy and two people getting less careful. Those clocks cannot be synchronised, so the novel alternates, and the corporate material is the least interesting thing in it by a considerable margin.

Xavier does nothing. Xavier does nothing beautifully. Xavier has organised an entire personality around never being asked to try, and the moment somebody expects something of him the whole construction starts to creak.

Sloane is why this holds together, and Huang has been placing her for three books. A publicist who runs her own firm, treats incompetence as a personal affront, and has an ex-fiance and an estranged sister she does not discuss. Her competence is not a quirk. It is the only thing she has been able to rely on.

He falls first and Huang writes it as delight rather than as possession. Xavier's chapters are besotted, funny about being besotted, and free of the proprietary menace the shelf usually installs in a billionaire hero.

Grumpy and sunshine is the label and the assignment is the interesting part. She is the grump, he is the sunshine, and the reversal matters because it makes her seriousness the default and his lightness the thing requiring explanation.

Grief is handled better than the plot around it. A mother's death in a fire, and a boy who decided it was his fault and never revisited the verdict, and Huang lets that sit as an unexamined conviction rather than a trauma to be recited.

The father is the book's hardest material. A dying man who has never approved, leaving a will drafted as a final instruction, and a son who has to work out whether refusing is defiance or more of the same avoidance.

Everything closes more easily than the build deserves. Two people this heavily barricaded do not usually lower everything in the space Huang allows, and the final stretch moves faster than the two hundred pages that earned it.

He was never lazy. He was waiting to find something worth the risk of failing at.