Book 2 in the Harlot’s Bay Series
🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 2.8/5 | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read Second Chance Romance yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
I Was So Ready For This One. And Then.
After At First Spite I was fully on board for this series. Like, buckled in, popcorn ready, completely committed. At First Spite was chaotic and hilarious and a giant unhinged circus and I loved every second of it. So when I found out book two was going to be Carl — Carl the baker who blasts monster porn audiobooks at full volume in his bakery — and the narrator of those very audiobooks? I thought this was going to be even more unhinged than the first one.
Reader, it was not.
I finished this one in four days. Four. Days. For context I finished At First Spite in basically one sitting. That tells you everything you need to know.
The Full Story — Spoilers Included
Okay so the setup is genuinely fun. Carl — now in his forties — is sick and hiding from a busybody who comes into the bakery. His staff tell her he’s unavailable. Some joking happens between staff members about how something from his past caught up to him, maybe he met his nemesis — just goofing around. Busybody overhears, misinterprets the whole thing, and runs off to print a deeply cryptic obituary in the local newspaper suggesting Carl is dead and someone is covering it up.
This is genuinely funny. This had so much potential.
The author of the monster porn audiobooks — who also lives in Harlots Bay — sends the obituary to Molly Dearborn, the audiobook narrator of said books, who promptly loses her mind and rushes back to Harlots Bay only to find Carl is, in fact, completely alive.
Athena and Matthew show up briefly for a reunion moment because they’re friends with Carl, which gives us the only real taste of the chaos energy from book one. It’s a cameo. It’s not enough.
So here’s the actual backstory: Molly moved around constantly as a kid and never bothered setting down roots because what was the point. Then she landed in Harlots Bay for what was supposed to be her last couple years of high school. She actually started to belong somewhere for once. She stood up for Carl during some cheating scandal — pointed out he didn’t actually cheat when the school was ready to crucify him — and they became close friends. Carl very clearly wanted to date her. He was just a complete chicken shit and never asked. Molly apparently felt the same way. Also a chicken shit. Nobody asked anybody out. And then Molly left suddenly — a couple of weeks before graduation, didn’t even finish out the year — because she found out her dad had an entire secret second family. That’s the gut punch reveal the book builds toward…
So now they’re both in their forties, reunited under deeply stupid circumstances, and apparently neither of them has grown up much emotionally since high school. Carl finds a way to convince her to stay for a few weeks because she just wants to hook up with him, he wants to be with her. But she’s emotionally damaged.. blah, blah, blah…
Then there’s the ex husband. Molly put him through medical school — she paid for it, supported him, gave him years of her life — and the second he graduated he dumped her. Classic. Now he’s engaged to someone else and they are both absolutely obsessed with getting Molly’s house. It was her grandparents’ house, sold to her at a good price, and her ex feels bizarrely entitled to it and will not stop harassing her about it. He’s the villain of this book and honestly the most interesting thing in it because at least he gave Molly something to push against.
The problem is she only pushes back against Carl and against her ex husband in completely different ways. With Carl she has a backbone. With her ex she just… slinks. Hangs up on him. Keeps letting him contact her. Keeps not dealing with it. I get that there’s trauma. I do. But at some point — and I say this with love — when you are forty years old you have to grow the fuck up.
Both main characters spend most of this book acting like they’re back in high school. The will-they-won’t-they is not the fun chaotic kind. It’s just frustrating. They circle each other, they have feelings, they act weird about it, they don’t communicate, they repeat this cycle.
The monster porn that was such a huge chaotic presence in book one? Barely here. That element — the thing that made Carl so wonderfully bizarre — is almost entirely absent. The steam that does exist arrives late in the book and while it’s detailed it feels disconnected from everything else rather than earned.
Best Part of This Book
The fake death premise is genuinely funny and had real potential. The dad’s secret second family reveal actually landed emotionally. And any scene with Athena in it was a reminder of what this series is capable of being. Apparently she was in fact the fun crazy circus…
Worst Part of This Book
It lost the plot. Literally. The chaos, the humor, the unhinged energy that made At First Spite so memorable — gone. What’s left is a fairly standard second chance romance between two people who communicate like teenagers and take forever to get anywhere. When you’re reading this back to back with book one the tonal whiplash is genuinely jarring. These books don’t feel like they belong to the same series.
Also Molly’s backbone situation drove me absolutely insane. She stands up to Carl no problem. Her ex husband calls and she just… lets it happen. Over and over. Grow up, Molly. You’re forty.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
🔥🔥🔥🔥 — The spice arrives late and it’s detailed when it gets there. But it’s not earned spice. It feels like it shows up after the book finally remembers it’s supposed to be a romance.
The Ending — Satisfied or Disappointed?
Disappointed. Not devastated — the ending wraps things up fine. But fine is exactly the problem. It wraps up exactly how you suspect it will- in a boring way. After At First Spite set such a high bar, fine feels like a letdown. The ex husband situation gets resolved, Carl and Molly get their act together, everything lands where you expect it to land. Nothing surprised me. Nothing made me gasp or laugh or throw my headphones across the room. And I mean NOTHING in this book made me laugh.
Would I Reread It?
No. You could not pay me enough.
The Hot Take
This book would probably be a perfectly enjoyable three point nine out of five if you read it completely standalone and never touched At First Spite first. The problem is you’re not going to do that. You’re going to read book one, fall completely in love with the chaos and weirdness and think over and over again ‘What the fuck am I listening to?’, and come to book two expecting more of the same. And it is not more of the same. At all. As a standalone romance it’s fine. As book two of this series it is a disappointment.
Who Is This For
If you loved At First Spite and need to know what happens next in Harlots Bay — go ahead, read it. Just adjust your expectations significantly. If you’re coming for the chaotic unhinged energy of book one — it’s not here. If you want a relatively low drama second chance romance with some spice late in the game — this might actually be your thing.
Where to Get This Book
📖 Physical Book
🎧 Audiobook
📱 Ebook
📚 More from the Harlot’s Bay Series
- Book 1 — At First Spite | Reviewed by LD | ⭐ 3.8/5 | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥 — [Read the Review]
- Book 2 — Second Chance Romance | Reviewed by LD | ⭐ 2.8/5 | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥 — [Read the Review]
Plot Twisted. 🔥
🎧 | Series: Harlot’s Bay Series Book 2 | Genre: Romance | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥 | Narrators: Joy Nash, Stephen Dexter