Rating: 4.5 stars
Buy Link: Amazon | All Romance | Amazon UK
Length: Novel

Nicky Abbondanza and Noah Oliver are back with another side splitting mystery. With Treemeadow College’s annual bodybuilding competition just around the corner, Nicky and Noah are asked to bring their drama skills to the Physical Education building to help create a show no one will forget, featuring the contestants as Greek gods. As the competition begins to heat up, bodies begin dropping! With contestants and faculty members dropping faster than barbells, it’s up to Nicky and Noah to help Detective Manuello solve the case (whether he wants the help or not) before there is no one left in the competition.

As the two begin investigating the newest set of murders on the small campus, Nicky and Noah have their own issues to deal with. When Noah’s parents come to visit (straight off the farm in Wisconsin) and start pressing the two to make their relationship official, Nicky begins to realize that Noah is hiding something. Between Noah’s reluctance to pop the question and some suspicious behavior between Noah and one of the Physical Education professors, Nicky finds that he may need to investigate more than just the murders.

Though this book picks up where the last book left off – with Nicky and Noah in a relationship with one another – this book could be read as a standalone, though I highly recommend readers start with the first in the series because this series is absolutely hysterical! We are talking laugh out loud funny. So you’ve been warned if you try to read while in public…people tend to look at you oddly when you just start laughing.

Once again, the story is told in Nicky’s point of view and it is loaded with his snarky humor. While he still tries to mimic his inner Sherlock Holmes, in this book he also tends to put himself into the Clark Kent investigative reporter role with his new side-kick Jimmy, a drama student who is working as an aide in the Physical Education department, when he begins to suspect that there is something going on between Noah and Professor Van “Granite.”

Much like the first book in the series, this story is packed full of drama. Nicky is over-the-top and reminded me of a gay-version of Lucille Ball where the intent is good, just things never seem to go exactly how they planned!

As a mystery, this story delivers. As the body count keeps rising, so does the potential number of suspects to these murders. Are they all committed by the same person or persons, and if so, for what reason? Readers will be on the edge of their seats waiting for the killer to be revealed.

As a romance, readers will love seeing Nicky and Noah settling in to living together in their Victorian home…and Nicky meeting the parents! Yet…is everything perfect in Nicky’s and Noah’s personal lives?

While I adored this book as much as I did the first, I was a bit put off with the voyeurism that was going on in this book. It seemed as if Nicky kept stumbling upon other characters getting it on. So most of the “sexy” scenes in the book are going on with secondary characters, rather than Nicky (with his 9”) and Noah. It felt as if the author felt the need to add sex to the story and there is a lot of sex going on with all these contestants and faculty. As a reader, I would have preferred gloss overs of what Nicky was seeing and left the sexy scenes to Nicky and Noah.

Overall, I thought this was a great follow up story to the first in the series and can’t wait for the next to come out – though, I will admit, at some point there isn’t going to be anyone left at Treemeadow College with all these murders going on! If you are looking for a book to escape reality for a while, you’ll want to pick up this up. I highly recommend this series.