Deep end

Bestseller Hazelwood (The Love Hypothesis) spins a kinky, character-driven new adult romance. After star diver Scarlett Vandermeer, a junior at Stanford, is seriously injured during a competition, she fights to recover the fearless spirit that made her an athletic standout. Her best friend, Pen, has recently broken up with Swedish senior Lukas "Luk" Blomqvist, an Olympic swimming champion, and drunkenly confides to Scarlett that they were sexually incompatible due to Luk's interest in BDSM. With Pen's blessing, Scarlett, who is similarly inclined, meets up with Luk to negotiate a no-commitment, dom/sub relationship. The kink is relatively mild, consisting mostly of power exchange, and the pair quickly break their no-strings rule. As they help each other heal the broken bits of themselves, both work to balance their relationship, their athletic ambitions, and their demanding premed majors--until an important competition throws off everyone's equilibrium. The chemistry between Scarlett and Lukas is volcanic thanks to Hazelwood's crisp prose and molten-hot sex scenes. The author's fans will eat this up. Agent: Thao Le, Sandra Dijkstra Literary. (Feb.)

A collegiate diver and swimmer secretly pursue kink together, and risk falling in love along the way. Scarlett Vandermeer is struggling. Despite a successful recovery from the injury that almost ended her Stanford diving career, she hasn't been able to get her head together, and it's affecting her performance. Plus, she's trying to stay focused on getting into medical school. A relationship would be out of the question. By comparison, Lukas Blomqvist is a swimming idol, a record-breaker who wins medals as easily as breathing, and Scarlett has long been convinced he would never look in her direction--until one fateful night when a mutual friend lets slip that they have something unexpected in common: Scarlett likes to be submissive in the bedroom, while Lukas prefers to take a dominant approach. Now, they both know a big secret about each other, and it's something neither of them can stop thinking about. It's Lukas who suggests they have a fling--purely physical, just to take the edge off, so Scarlett can get out of her own head and stop overthinking her dives. Initially, their arrangement is easy to stick to, but the more time they spend together, the more Scarlett starts to realize that what she feels for Lukas is more than physical attraction. Complicating the situation is the fact that Scarlett's friend Penelope Ross used to go out with Lukas, and the longer Scarlett keeps mum about her true feelings for him, the more difficult it is to keep the situation hidden from another person she really cares about. While Scarlett and Lukas' relationship does begin as a physical one, their deeper psychological connection takes a little too long to emerge amid all the other storylines, resulting in a somewhat rushed resolution. However, Hazelwood's latest is proof of the depth and maturity that has emerged in her writing over the years, and it highlights her embrace of sexier, more emotional elements than were present in her original STEMinist rom-coms. A surprisingly sensual sports romance. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.