Risky Game: An Out of Bounds NovelBy Tracy SolheimBerkley Sensation, 2014 One of the drawbacks of novels-in-series is the almost embarrassing way they can start to seem like derivatives of each other, even down to the little details. Romance author Tracy Solheim courts just such a danger in her ongoing “Out of Bounds” novels, in which spunky young women find themselves in romantically awkward positions with moltenly attractive sports stars. The actual sports in these novels is so irrelevant they might as well all be jai-alai or soccer or some such equally farfetched endeavor.The fact that in Solheim’s latest, Risky Game, the sport in question is NFL football just makes the proceedings that much more inadvertently comical since a) in the real world, the entire NFL currently sports exactly one moltenly attractive star, and he spends all his spare time carrying a man-purse and filming clothing commercials, b) the rest of the NFL is populated by refrigerator-sized behemoths who are only vaguely human and only interact with spunky young women when they’re punching them through plate-glass windows, and c) it couldn’t be any clearer that Solheim herself isn’t interested in American-style football – or at least not interested in dramatizing its politics, economics, or action (our author, bless her palpitating heart, couldn’t write a fast-paced fourth down to save her life).You’d think three such handicaps would fatally impair any novel, but Risky Game, like the rest of Solheim’s books, is first and foremost a fantasy – it’s moltenly attractive star, Brody Janik, might as well be a Corellian trader or a Gotham City crime-fighter.Instead, he’s the latest object of interest for enterprising blogger Shannon “Shay” Everett, whom we meet in the requisite awkward setting – hidden in the team’s locker room, in this case:

Shannon “Shay” Everett had been in some compromising positions in her life. Many of them even of her own doing. Growing up in a small town in Texas as the daughter of a down-and-out rodeo rider and a beauty salon owner, the rebellious tomboy had gotten into more embarrassing scrapes than she could reckon. That being said, she never envisioned herself stuffed into a cubby inside an NFL locker room late at night. A locker room that was supposed to be empty. Only it wasn’t. Hell’s bells.

She’s going through all this mortification for the sake of getting the scoop on notorious lothario Janik, who’s a vision in a white towel:

Shay willed her stomach not to growl at the sight before her, but Brody was a spectacular example of grade-A prime athlete in all his physical glory. Her mouth watered as she took in all six feet three inches, two hundred ten pounds of perfectly sculpted muscle standing beneath a single shaft of light, the scene reminiscent of a statue of a Greek god on display in a museum somewhere. All that was missing was a pedestal for him to stand on.

Solheim is very skilled at the emotional pratfalls to which she subjects her hapless heroine, and those pratfalls naturally increase once Brody Janik turns his lust – and eventually his heart – in her direction:

There was no mistaking the look in his eyes now and she could feel the warmth of pleasure begin deep in her belly. Shay let herself revel in the joy that a man actually cared enough to be concerned about her, but only for a moment, This was Brody Janik, after all.

(It’s an open question why Solheim so often likens love to indigestion; my own guess is that she tends to snack while she writes)Risky Game is as entertaining as everything Solheim writes, but the whole fact that it bills itself as a sports novel is seriously undercut by how interchangeable its sports-setting would be with practically any other sport. Who knows how much more entertaining our author’s books would be if she allowed herself to go out of bounds once in a while.