Rachel Reid Audiobooks

Rachelle Goguen writes as Rachel Reid, and from a home base in Nova Scotia she has done more than almost anyone to make hockey romance a genre in its own right. Her Game Changers novels follow professional players in and around the top flight of the sport, and they are love stories between men.

What makes them work is that the sport is never wallpaper. She writes the locker room, the road trips, the trades and the injuries with real fluency, and she treats the closet as a professional problem as much as a personal one: contracts, sponsors, teammates, the press. The stakes feel like stakes.

The books are warm rather than cynical, funny in the small moments and unafraid of heat when the story has earned it. A television adaptation of Heated Rivalry brought a much wider audience to the series, though readers had been pressing these on one another for years before the cameras ever turned up.

The obvious way in is Game Changer, the opening Game Changers novel and by some distance the most rated title on her shelf here, with tens of thousands of listeners weighing in. Tor Thom narrates, as he does the fan favourite Heated Rivalry, the rivals-to-lovers instalment that eventually reached television.

From there the series runs through Tough Guy and Common Goal to Role Model and The Long Game, the last of which is the highest rated of the individual novels here at 4.8. Cooper North takes over the narration for the later books, and between them the two performers have become the voices readers associate with the series.

Game Changers Volume 2 gathers several instalments into one very long listen, and Unrivaled is still to come. Best taken in order. The shelf below has them lined up for you.