 | Along for the Ride (Ride or Die Romances) by Lauren Biel ★★★★☆ Read: June 12, 2026 286 pages |
I went into this one already trusting Lauren Biel after Hitched & Sinner's Retreat, and she didn't let me down — but she didn't wreck me either, and with this author, I know she's capable of it.
The setup is strong. Leana is running from a man who got her hooked on drugs at seventeen and kept her caged for seven years. She steals a car, picks up two hitchhiking brothers because she felt bad for them, and promptly gets kidnapped by a pair of contract killers who can't agree on whether to f*ck her or bury her. Gentry is the older brother — forty-six, controlled, dominant, soft underneath in ways he doesn't want to examine. Karson is the younger — unhinged, violent, the kind of man who threatens necr*philia over hotel room territory and means it. Between them sits six years of silence, a murdered wife, and a betrayal neither of them has processed.
Biel handles the brothers well. Gentry's dominance isn't performed — it's structural. He controls because that's how he protects, and the line between the two is so thin that even he can't always find it. Karson is consistent from page one to the last — a genuine psychopath who never softens, never becomes safe, but bends for Leana in ways that surprise even him. The moment he chooses not to kill for her is more powerful than any love confession he could have given, because it costs him the only thing he actually enjoys.
The darkness is real. This isn't dark rom-com territory — it's dark romance with teeth, the content warnings exist for a reason, and the list is long. Biel earns most of it. The characters don't betray their own logic, and Leana's survival instincts feels built from genuine trauma rather than plot convenience. The scene where both brothers hold space for her revenge against her abuser is the emotional core of the entire book, and it lands.
Where it lost me is structure. The book is episodic — kill, hotel, sex, road, kill, hotel, sex — and while the individual scenes work, there's no larger engine underneath pulling everything toward something inevitable. I never felt like the story was building to a destination. Things happened, and they were dark, and they were hot, and the characters stayed true to themselves, but when I got to the end I found myself asking what the actual plot was beyond survival and road trip chaos.
Still a solid read. Biel knows how to write morally bankrupt men you have no business rooting for and an FMC who can, mostly, hold her own between them. But it's a 3.5 — respected, not remembered.
Tropes: MFM · hitmen blood brothers · forced proximity · kidnapping · captor/captive · primal play · knife play · breeding kink · dark road trip · dubcon/noncon · SA · age gap · death play · blood play · knife play · touch her and die · drug abuse
Track your own reading journey ✦
Discover Tynga Publishing Reading Journals
