Breakfast at Shorehill is a crowded affair: a long wooden table, benches either side, platters of pancakes and bacon from a French cook who calls her his little cabbage. Imogen sits at the end. Lincoln takes the seat beside her without a word, talks to everyone except her, and lets his thigh rest against hers for the whole meal. Neither of them moves. Neither of them speaks. It is the most romantic scene in The Game by Sadie Kincaid, and it happens between two people who are furious with each other.
Sadie Kincaid Opens the Windows
The Auction, the first half of this duet, lived inside RooksBlood, a crumbling mansion hiding a fortress, where a masked billionaire kept the young woman he had bought. The Game by Sadie Kincaid spends a short opening stretch with Imogen back under her grandfather’s roof, interrogated over tea and biscuits by people she no longer recognises, and then relocates almost everything to a working cattle ranch in Colorado.
Those early chapters are quietly the strongest writing in the book. Saul, cold and brittle, lets Imogen into his locked parlour and asks whether she “allowed” her godfather near her, and she turns the word back on him: the women sold beside her were never in a position to allow anything. Kincaid lets her heroine win the exchange without raising her voice. A memory of snow and a mother’s cold nose against her cheek, half-remembered from before the grandfather’s estate, is placed early and pays off much later. The ranch shelters women freed from the same auctions, run by a woman Lincoln once saved from a violent husband.
That move changes what kind of story this is. There are horses to feed and a garden of Gambel oaks and wildflowers, and Imogen, raised in isolation, finds her first real friend in Esme, a fellow captive she had privately nicknamed during their weeks awaiting sale. Their talk about old boyfriends and Esme’s unspoken feelings for Lincoln’s partner gives the novel a lightness the first book never had. Readers who found The Auction claustrophobic will feel the windows open. Pierre, the elderly cook who followed Lincoln from RooksBlood, holds film nights in his cabin and treats the cinema of the nineties as compulsory education, and the novel’s affection for him is infectious. Imogen’s discovery of ordinary things, from using a computer mouse to quoting a movie line back at the man she loves, gives The Game by Sadie Kincaid a sweetness that sits oddly but pleasingly beside its brutality.
The cost is momentum. Large stretches of the middle are domestic, and the Brotherhood, the secret order behind the auctions, recedes to a rumour for chapters at a time.
An Argument That Keeps Coming Back
Lincoln took Imogen from her grandfather’s house by sedating her in her sleep, and the novel’s central quarrel grows from that act. She says he stole her choice. He says he would do it again to keep her alive. Both are telling the truth, which is the most interesting thing about it, and Kincaid lets the reader sit with a hero whose love looks, from certain angles, exactly like the control Imogen grew up under. Even the fact that he is her godparent, the man her parents chose to protect her, is set against the desire neither of them can switch off.
It helps that Imogen is never simply the object of the debate. Her first-person chapters alternate with Lincoln’s, and the alternation lets The Game by Sadie Kincaid show each of them misreading the other: he hears betrayal where she meant hope, she hears contempt where he meant fear. The trouble is repetition. The same accusations about lying and being treated as a child surface in scene after scene, the internal monologue revisits questions already answered, and two late-arriving characters exist mostly to provoke jealousy. A sharper edit could have lost fifty pages without losing a beat of feeling. The love scenes, too, start to blur. They are often where the quarrel gets resolved, which is honest about the couple, but the vocabulary of praise and command repeats so closely from one to the next that they stop carrying new information about these two people.
Freedom Is the Real Climax
The violence, when it comes, is extreme even for dark romance: on-page torture, executions, and a basement sequence in which sexual assault is threatened and attempted. The novel also deals throughout with trafficking, a forced operation in the heroine’s past, surveillance and a wide age gap, and its sex scenes are very explicit and frequent, with praise, dominance and, later, carefully negotiated impact play. Readers should know all of that going in. The violence is never played for titillation, and the rescued women are written with tenderness, but the novel asks a reader to spend time inside a hero who enjoys inflicting pain on the men who trade in women, and it does not pretend otherwise.
The finale of The Game by Sadie Kincaid arrives in a rush of revelations that rearrange the family Imogen thought she had, and the secret order is then dismantled with suspicious ease. As a thriller, the ending is the weakest part of the book. As a romance it does something braver. The last chapters are about a young woman who has never chosen anything, given a year to discover what she wants, with no promise the answer will include him. That idea, borrowed from nobody, makes the whole duet look more thoughtful in hindsight. The pages that follow her through a year of small, ordinary independence, a job behind a counter, a library card, an elderly neighbour across a chessboard, are among the most tender Kincaid has written, precisely because nothing dangerous happens in them.
Sadie Kincaid and Her Ruthless World
Sadie Kincaid lives in the UK with her husband and sons and built a large readership for spicy dark romance before MIRA began publishing her. Fans of her Chicago Ruthless books will spot a cameo here: Keres, who runs a Chicago refuge with her two husbands, collects two rescued women from Lincoln and makes a strong impression in a handful of pages. The Wages of Sin duet is a shorter, more gothic project than those mafia sagas.
The Game by Sadie Kincaid came out on 3 November 2026, and it is the end of the story begun in The Auction, which readers must finish first. Those who want Kincaid’s mafia side should start with Dante. For a hero whose obsession is the whole engine, Hunt the Villain by Rina Kent is a natural next read, while Brynne Weaver’s Harvest Season offers the same darkness with far more laughter.
Final Thoughts
The Game by Sadie Kincaid is uneven: too long in the middle, too brutal for many readers and too quick to tidy away its villains. Yet it understands something many captivity romances do not, that rescuing a woman is not the same as setting her free. Its heroine learns the difference before its hero does, and the book is better for letting her teach him. The Game by Sadie Kincaid ends not with a locked door but an open road.