J.J. Mulder Audiobooks

Ice hockey and love stories make up the whole of the J.J. Mulder project, and the two turn out to belong together rather well. The writing is queer sports romance: the rink, the locker room, the endless road trips, and the particular difficulty of falling for somebody when your working life is played in front of a crowd.

Two interlinked series carry it. Offsides follows players in the professional game, while SCU Hockey moves to the college ice, where a squad coached by Nico Mackenzie works through its own tangles. Characters cross between the two, which is a good part of the pleasure for anyone reading both. The machinery will be familiar to romance readers, banter, slow burn, forced proximity, and it is handled with a steady hand, but the sport itself is written with real attention to how a game actually moves.

Little is published about the author beyond the books themselves, so the work is the honest guide. Happily, it is consistent enough that starting anywhere does no harm.

The Mulder audiobooks here divide neatly by series. Shots on Net opens SCU Hockey, the college-set strand, and is read by Iggy Toma across just under nine hours. If you want the campus version of this world, with all the first-time nerves that implies, begin there.

On the Offsides side, From Coast to Coast is ready now and Changing the Game is on its way, both narrated by Liam DiCosimo. Changing the Game is the series opener, so anyone who likes to read in order will want to wait for it, although these books stand up perfectly well taken singly.

Listener scores so far sit in the low fours across the board. Have a look at what is on the shelf below, and do check back as more of the ice arrives.