Twisted Games

Twisted Games is the second novel in Ana Huang's Twisted series and the first of the four to be written around a couple whose obstacle is rank rather than history. Huang is a Chinese-American author who began self-publishing contemporary romance after 2019, building an audience on short-form social video before Bloom Books reissued the series for a wider print readership. The Twisted novels are standalone stories that share a friendship group, so this one can be read without the first, though the order the author recommends starts with Twisted Love.

Bridget von Ascheberg has spent her life as the second child of a royal family, which means being visible at ceremonies and irrelevant to the succession. When her brother abdicates, she inherits the throne, a country she has been kept away from for years and a protection team with instructions that treat her as an object to be moved. Rhys Larsen is the man in charge of that team: disciplined, blunt, and running an internal set of rules that exist mostly to keep him from caring about the people he guards. The novel sets the two of them against each other in cars, hotels and palaces, and then takes Bridget to the country she is expected to rule.

The romance is a contemporary one with a fictional European kingdom standing in for a real constitutional monarchy, and the book alternates between Bridget's and Rhys's viewpoints so that neither the duty nor the desire is a mystery. It is the middle volume of four, published in a series the author designed so that each pair gets a complete arc, and it carries the same content warnings as its companions: power imbalance, on-page sex and a family that treats its youngest daughter as an asset.