Reviewed by Valerie
TITLE: Bad Bishop
SERIES: Perfect Play Trilogy #2
AUTHOR: Layla Reyne
PUBLISHER: Self-Published
LENGTH: 229 pages
RELEASE DATE: October 4, 2022
BLURB:
When a marriage of convenience becomes more than either husband bargained for…
Special Agent Levi Bishop needs to:
Keep his son and family safe.
Prove his boss was framed for a crime she didn’t commit.
Convince his selfless cowboy husband that his needs matter too.
Make a bold play before love slips through his fingers.
Special Agent Emmitt Marshall needs to:
Protect his husband and stepson.
End the nightmare that’s haunted him since his mentor’s murder.
Hack through layers of deception to identify the real threat.
Stop hoping someone will choose him.
Marsh is determined to go it alone, to guard his family and his heart.
But Levi’s life and heart are on the line too.
Cornered, Levi will chance any play to save the marriage and man he needs.
Rings were exchanged and promises made.
Marsh kept up his end of the bargain.
Now it’s Levi’s turn.
REVIEW:
Bad Bishop is book two in the Perfect Play trilogy, a continuation of Marsh and Levi’s story as husbands of convenience turned into a genuine marriage of love. Underlying those growing feelings is a story of espionage, murder, exploding chess sets, and mortal danger in the States and Europe. Layla Reyne has a history of excelling in this action/thriller romance genre. I feel the execution was not as strong as in Dead Draw, however.
This is a same couple series with the action picking up immediately after book one ended. Marsh, Levi, David, Brax, Holt, and Lily travel to the Texas ranch owned by Marsh’s moms. David will be safe there as the men follow the leads to unravel the crimes committed by Orchard Investments and Eder Capital, solve who killed Sophie, and who planted the exploding chess sets back in San Diego. And finally, they need to determine if there’s a mole in the mix. They travel across the pond from Texas to The Hague to Vienna and Salzburg in Austria.
My issue with this book is that I couldn’t keep track of the large number of characters – agents and bad guys – and couldn’t keep all their names straight. I certainly didn’t feel like skimming Dead Draw to refresh my memory. I just read on accepting that I would be in the dark sometimes.
It’s clear both men want a future together – a family of three – and already Marsh appears to love David a great deal – but Marsh grapples with a fear of being abandoned by Levi. He’s still worried that Levi hasn’t grieved enough for his late wife, Kristen, and therefore isn’t ready for a new relationship.
Levi’s family, whom I enjoyed so much in Dead Draw, is absent this time but we get Marsh’s two moms. I love how they immediately take David under their wings. They live on a ranch that Reyne describes so beautifully: the desert landscape surrounds their homestead with its flowers and grasses, rows of vegetables growing, the log cabin, and silos and water towers rising above. David, who wants to be a vet, is in heaven amid all the animals.
Be aware that Bad Bishop ends on a cliffhanger, much more so than Dead Draw did. Given my confusion over who’s who, if I wasn’t reviewing these books one at a time, I’d wait for the third book to come out next summer (Amazon says June 2023), re-read book one and then read all three back-to-back. It might help me keep track of all the players.
Hopefully other readers will have better functioning memories than I did! Despite the confusion, I made it to the end fully understanding the plot. If I have to wait until June for the next installment, I’m going to forget everything again, lol. Recommended.
RATING: 
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