Hooked

Hooked is at its best when the villain's plan looks less seductive than the woman who might ruin it.

James has prepared a revenge scheme and made the classic error of assuming another human being will behave like a useful piece of it. I enjoy a villain whose calculations begin to fail. I enjoy it less when the woman paying for the failure is asked to mistake danger for proof of devotion. Emily McIntire's Hooked gave me both reactions, often within a chapter. That friction kept me reading and kept me arguing.

The title invites a familiar childhood story, then puts away the nursery furniture. This is dark contemporary romance. Its borrowings from Peter Pan are names, roles and a taste for inversion, rather than magic or a return to Neverland. Once I stopped looking for fairy dust, the central arrangement became clearer: a man pursuing revenge meets a woman who has spent too long being controlled by somebody else. That is an excellent source of tension. It also demands care the book does not always give it.

The premise (no spoilers past Wendy entering James's bar)

Hooked is the first Never After book, published in 2021. James, known as Hook, wants to destroy his enemy Peter Michaels. Peter's twenty year old daughter Wendy enters James's bar, and he decides to seduce her as part of the revenge plan. Wendy has been kept sheltered by her wealthy, distant father. A night out opens a relationship with James, whose dangerous world soon makes her question how much of him she understands.

That is the publisher's early bargain: revenge on one side, attraction on the other, and Wendy caught in the distance between James's name and his reputation. The story is contemporary rather than fantasy, so its menace comes from people with money and power. A beautiful villain cannot wave away that fact with a theatrical nickname. He has to be considered as a man making choices.

What works

McIntire gives James an immediately legible desire. Revenge organises his attention and supplies a reason for the early moves he makes toward Wendy. That clarity helps the novel travel quickly. The reader can see the danger in the arrangement before Wendy can, and the gap between those positions creates suspense without needing elaborate exposition. I was turning pages because I wanted to know whether the story would allow her to close it.

The fractured fairy tale idea works best as an argument about roles. A Hook figure ought to be the villain, a Wendy figure ought to be protected, and a Peter figure ought to be the hero. McIntire rearranges those expectations in a modern setting. The borrowed names are a shortcut, yes, but an efficient one: they give the reader a pattern to mistrust. Once I realised the story was using recognition as bait rather than promising a literal retelling, I enjoyed the mischief more.

Wendy's sheltered background makes her attraction to danger understandable without making it automatically wise. She has reasons to want an existence beyond her father's rules. The strongest passages treat her curiosity as a hunger for her own life, not just a hunger for James. That distinction matters. A dark romance becomes much more interesting when the heroine wants freedom as fiercely as the hero wants her.

The prose is built for velocity. McIntire favours a quick exchange, a sharply stated desire and a turn toward the next complication. It gives the book an almost breathless pull. At its best, that speed captures the disorientation of an attraction arriving before trust. I can forgive a great deal of heightened dialogue when the structure knows exactly which question it wants me to carry into the next chapter.

What's polarising

The same speed can make emotional change feel underargued. James's fascination with Wendy arrives within a plot he designed to use her. For me, a convincing turn from manipulation to care requires more than increased intensity. The book supplies intensity generously; I wanted more time spent on what he understands about the harm he has set in motion. He can change his mind about wanting her and still owe her an account of what he chose before.

Wendy can also feel more sheltered by the writing than a heroine in this situation should. Her inexperience is useful to the suspense, but it sometimes keeps her from asking the question sitting plainly on my own tongue. I do not require a dark romance heroine to make prudent decisions. I do require the novel to respect the intelligence behind her imprudent ones. There were moments I wanted to borrow Wendy for a quiet afternoon and return her with a notebook full of questions.

The Peter Pan echoes may disappoint readers expecting either a close retelling or a richly built fantasy world. They are more like signposts along a contemporary crime romance. That choice is legitimate, but the title carries expectations the book does not fully satisfy. I liked the role reversal; I was less impressed when the story leaned on recognition instead of developing a fresh emotional consequence from it.

The James of it

James is compelling because the revenge plot gives his desire an ugly origin. He does not meet Wendy on equal ground, and the novel does not become morally interesting until that imbalance is visible. I found him most readable when his certainty cracked, when he had to recognise that wanting Wendy and respecting her are separate tasks. A villain can be allowed a romance. He should not be awarded one simply for experiencing an inconvenient feeling.

That is my quarrel with his allure. McIntire can make threat and attraction coexist on a page, but she sometimes treats the electricity between them as an answer to the ethical question she has raised. It is not an answer. It is the reason the question hurts. My verdict on James is therefore deliberately untidy: he is effective as a dark romance hero precisely because I could not relax around him.

Spice and heat

The heat is 4 of 5, explicit open door. There are on-page sexual scenes, and the attraction is bound up with danger rather than separated into a softer courtship. This is adult material. Wendy is twenty, and the book's sexual relationship is between adults; its references to abuse of minors concern traumatic material, not a romance involving a child.

Content note: the author's warnings include breath play, torture, killing, physical assault, kidnapping, and descriptions of child sexual and physical abuse. Those topics deserve plain notice. I would not recommend reading past your own limits just because the villain has an excellent entrance. The book can be exciting and still be the wrong one for you.

Who it's for

You want a contemporary villain romance with a revenge engine and enough heat to make the moral argument uncomfortable. You like familiar story roles turned inside out and can accept a hero whose conduct remains open to criticism. You are willing to read the content notes before the first chapter. If you need a careful progression from trust to intimacy, this will probably run ahead of you. If you want to watch a plan unravel under the weight of one person James failed to understand, step inside.

Books like Hooked

• Scarred by Emily McIntire: another Never After villain story, with royal power replacing this book's contemporary revenge plot.
• Butcher & Blackbird by Brynne Weaver: dark romance with a more comic voice and substantially graphic violence, for readers who want the danger shared between the leads.
• The Contortionist by Kathryn Ann Kingsley: a sinister villain romance in an occult circus, if the one thing you wished Hooked had been was actual fantasy.

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