Midnight Message
Mina knows three things to be true.
1. She hates sports.
2. She's obsessed with an ice hockey player anyway.
3. Sliding into his DM's is the best and worst thing she's ever done
Dark Romance author Mina Mendoza has an obsession, and his name is Leo Duval. She knows everything about the star hockey player... like how many tattoos he has, where his aunt likes to holiday, the layout of his house and the date he bought it. But he doesn't know she exists. Or at least he didn't.
When Mina messages Leo in the middle of the night to say that he's exactly how she imagines the hero in her latest novel, she forgets that men can be cruel. One message turns into twenty screenshots, and a drunken group chat that alters the course of both their lives.
As it turns out, Leo knows some things about Mina too. Like the password to her phone, that her roommate sometimes forgets to lock their door at night, and that she sleeps like the dead.
Mina might have been stalking him first, but he can do it better.
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Community Reviews
Midnight Message had a lot of tropes going on. Despite the lack of focus, Mina and Leo stalking each other was funny and entertaining.
Mina is a struggling dark romance author who has taken her obsession with hockey player Leo Duval well beyond checking his Instagram occasionally. She knows his house layout, family vacation habits, and enough personal information to make a private investigator proud. Mina thinks she is excellent at stalking him. Leo figuring her out almost immediately made their cat and mouse game funny.
Leo knows exactly what Mina is doing and spends half his time messing with her while she continues believing she is sneaky. The lunch with Leo's sister was hilarious. Mina is trying to act completely normal while Leo appears purposely to unnerve her. Their mutual obsession gives the romance a playful quality that I did not expect from a stalker romance. Watching two people violate every reasonable boundary while simultaneously thinking the other person is the concerning one was adorable. In a very questionable dark romance sense, of course.
The hockey storyline felt strangely disconnected from the rest of the story. Leo is a professional hockey player and this gives him his public persona. It also provides the book with a blackmail subplot involving someone from his past. Hockey never felt important enough to justify how much narrative space it randomly took over. Leo's willingness to keep pleasing a childhood friend who is actively blackmailing him also made little sense to me. This man will break into Mina's home while she sleeps, but ruining the person threatening him is apparently where he draws the line? I have questions about this plot hole.
The sexual chemistry did not match the tone of their stalking games. Their interactions outside the bedroom were more exciting than anything happening inside it. The sex felt surprisingly vanilla considering how extreme their obsession with each other becomes. Somnophilia also plays a role in their relationship, but those scenes never became particularly sexy or convincing to me. I expected a much darker and hotter payoff from characters who already treat personal boundaries as gentle suggestions.
Mina and Leo were best when they were trying to out creep each other. Their confidence, mutual surveillance, and playful attempts to unsettle each other gave Midnight Message its charm. Pick this up if you love stalker romances with a lighter and teasing relationship.
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