On its own this is the best written Spruce Texas romance to date. Jimmy and to a lesser extent Bobby seem much more like characters than erotic fantasy place holders. For once the ending is efficient. Best of all the plot has a few narrative (minor) surprises in it. However, I could not get passed the novel’s connection to the prior works. This sort of (straight) best friend to lover storyline can be fraught. It is sort of fraught here. It’s not entirely clear-for example-how Jimmy contextualizes his sexual orientation. But the off-putting factor would be far less if Jimmy wasn’t a minor character in the first novel (and other novels). There’s a touching Platonic moment in the first novel that gets decontextualized as romance here and I wish the text left it alone. It works better as Platonic interaction. Likewise, I do not think Chambers should have played Jimmy-I’m not sure if Chambers should have been used at all. Chambers is the voice of Billy in the first novel; Billy ends up married to Jimmy’s older brother (plot of book 1) earlier in the series. Chambers doesn’t vary his voice all that much for Jimmy; I kept conflating the two characters. I don’t think Chambers as Bobby would have been that much better but this annoyed me in this context.