Description

Leslie is 40, working three jobs, and standing behind a shop counter when Dean walks in off a delivery van. The attraction is instant and the sex arrives fast, but Fear and Favour is not really about the falling. It’s about the staying. Dean is a man who vanishes. Three days, three months, five years: whenever intimacy closes in, he’s gone, and Leslie is left holding the pieces, and eventually a son, alone. What makes this story unusual for the genre is that it doesn’t pretend the pattern away. Leslie names it, sets her terms, gets hurt again anyway, and the book follows the full arc of a couple learning, slowly and expensively, how to be a family.

The second half widens into full family drama: a hostile ex named Shekayda, a lunch from hell, a decades-old rape accusation, and a paternity tangle involving Dean’s brothers that untangles in a genuinely unexpected direction. There are children, triplets eventually, a business built next door to the house, and a marriage in a Bridgetown church with only the priest’s wife for a crowd. The romance is explicit on the page, which drives the 18+ marker, and the emotional register runs raw throughout. Ricci writes middle-aged, plus-size, working-class love without apology, and Leslie is the kind of heroine who does the forgiving on her own schedule, not the hero’s.

For readers who want their romance grown, messy, and Caribbean to the bone.