Chokehold: A Dark MM Romance

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶
A delicious hot mess.
I feel like this was supposed to be a dark For the Fans, but the writing is just... bad.
The guys are both fairly vanilla and then suddenly either or both of them will flip to morally grey. It's like they're bi-polar. It would have been nice to have dark dueling morally grey MMCs, both trying to out grey the other one. Sigh, we did not get it.
It's got MF spice in the beginning quarter and MM for the rest. The spice is SPICY! At least 5/5 chilies on the spicy scale. It's definitely smůt.
The middle is a bit slow, but the spicy times are hot so I'm totally gonna let that slide.
The end is action-packed and the guys do get their HEA and 2 great epilogues. The primal in the last epilogue is fantastic!
I listened to the audiobook. The narrator's voices were so similar. It was almost impossible to tell whose chapter we were in. They both did good jobs. It just was so difficult.
I think this is duel because I just spent 20 minutes googling to see if it was duet, because that is how similar the voices are.
2 narrators, 2 POVs, first person

Chokehold is a dark and taboo MM romance that asks one very important question. What if two stepbrothers who hate each other were also completely obsessed with each other’s bodies? Cole and Blaise start as enemies with girlfriends, family drama, and enough resentment to fuel a very questionable masked chase game. Once anonymity enters the picture, their hatred shifts into something much more forbidden, possessive, and sexual. This book is filthy. The spice is not a side dish here. I mean the spice is the plot, the setting, the emotional support animal, and probably the family therapist. Cole and Blaise spend most of the book chasing, touching, taunting, fighting, and trying to see who can make the other one more unwell. I did like most of the sex scenes. They were hot, intense, and very focused on mutual pleasure. The dirty talk was great until the little brother and big brother stuff started. At that point, my soul packed a bag. My biggest problem was the length. This did not need to be a nearly thirteen-hour audiobook. The writing was excessive, and the same desire, jealousy, guilt, possessiveness, and secret longing kept circling until I wanted someone to please move the plot along. The plot is technically there, but it mostly pops in between sex scenes like, “Hey, remember me? We still have danger and family secrets.” During the two epilogues, one from Cole and one from Blaise, I was begging this book to let me go. Devon Ryder and Harley Chase had a lot of intense material to work with. The narration made every threat, moan, possessive demand, and cursed brother-coded line feel extra intense. That helped the spice, but it also made the parts that gave me the ick extra loud. Pick up Chokehold if you want taboo, primal, morally gray MM smut with barely any breathing room between explicit scenes. I liked the spice, hated the brother dirty talk, and still think this would have worked better as a novella.

3.75 ⭐️ 4.5 spice