Two performers are named in one review under this audiobook, and the narrator credit names only one of them. 'I've listened to enough Joe Arden and Teddy Hamilton to know they were well suited for this story and characters,' says the only review on this page that names a performer at all, before singling out Joe for an 'impeccable performance as a vulnerable, lost, and tortured man.' The sentence is cut off by the page before it finishes, though it arrives directly after an introduction of Max, the hockey player. Whoever carries the other half of this book appears nowhere in the credits, which is a genuine gap on a male-male romance whose two leads share the eight and a half hours between them.
First, the Big Picture
Sharpest of the five, one review logs three stars in the rating field and scores the book at three and a half out of five inside its own text, which is the first sign of a reader arguing with themselves. 'Hockey sticks and mafia tricks should be a match made in romance heaven, but this book is more like purgatory with occasional flashes of paradise.' That line does real work. It concedes the premise is good before it complains, and it is the fairest available framing of what Tori Chase has built: an appealing collision of two hard-worn subgenres that does not fire on every cylinder.
What Chase has assembled is a bodyguard romance with the safety mechanism removed. Luca spent five years burying a career as a Bratva enforcer and now works security for a professional hockey team, which is to say he took the quietest job that still involves standing between people and harm. Assigning him to Max, the team's star defenseman, drops the one thing he cannot afford to want straight into his job description. That is a clean engine. Whether it fires is what the reviews split on, and they split hard: five stars, four stars and three stars sit side by side on a page holding only five written reviews.
What Makes My Pucking Crush Worth Hearing
Filed in Australia in January 2025, one review names the appeal in a single line: 'The combination of hockey and Bratva/Mafia romance was new to me!' Hockey romance and mafia romance are both enormous and both heavily codified, and they almost never share a book, because their emotional logics pull in opposite directions. One runs on team, structure and public performance. The other runs on secrecy, debt and violence held just offstage. Dropping a former enforcer inside a locker room is a structural bet, and it is why this title has an identity most first-in-series sports romances never manage.
That same write-up flags something weightier than the genre mash. 'Both Max and Luca have experienced traumatic events in their past which understandably they continue to struggle with,' it notes, and it credits Chase with having 'written with care the traumatic and sensitive content in their story.' Relaying that accurately matters, because the description promises violence and bloodshed in the back story plus a shadow from the past aimed squarely at Max. Anyone who needs to know whether the darkness gets handled or wallowed in has one direct answer available on the page, and the answer is handled.
Men of the Rink opens here, and the numbering earns attention because the book behaves like a series pilot rather than a closed standalone. Luca's history is introduced as five years buried and then reactivated, a structure that expects further volumes to spend it in. The publisher credit is unusual too, pairing an individual's name, Deborah A. Garland, with Blue Nose Audio on a title bylined to Tori Chase. That combination points to an independent production rather than a house release, which is worth knowing when you are weighing what the credits do and do not tell you.
A Few Reservations
Specific criticism arrives in a four-star review from February 2026, and it is the most concrete objection on the listing: 'The dialogue between Luca and Max seems stilted. I'm not sure why, but it doesn't flow smoothly. The chemistry is off.' That is a hard thing to say about a romance, where chemistry is the entire product, and it comes from someone who liked the book enough to call the unexpected epilogue perfect. Read alongside the star spread, the pattern that emerges is a premise landing better than the pairing it was built to carry.
That same review carries the most practical warning here, and it is a format problem rather than a story one: download the bonus chapter before finishing the book, or the epilogue arrives feeling like a time jump with pieces missing. Bonus content distributed separately from the main file is standard indie romance practice and a standard indie romance nuisance, and in audio it bites harder, because a linear file offers no natural place to stop and go fetch something. The numbers add their own confusion. A 4.0 average sits above a count of three ratings while five written reviews are visible, and those five carry five, five, five, four and three stars, which averages to 4.4 rather than 4.0. Three votes can produce a clean 4.0, so the arithmetic is not impossible, but the pool that produced it is plainly not the pool you can read.
Who Should Pick Up My Pucking Crush
Romance listeners who want their hockey books to carry real stakes are the audience, and a five-star review from February 2026 compresses the case into a sentence: 'It had more depth than a lot of books like this.' If you have worked through the sports romance shelf and want the same warmth with a body count attached, or if you read mafia romance and have been waiting for a book that gives the enforcer somewhere to stand besides a warehouse, this was built for you. On content, the description names violence, bloodshed and a threat aimed at Max, so the darkness is advertised rather than sprung.
Slow-burn purists and anyone allergic to organized crime plotting inside a romance should pass. The Bratva material is not decorative, and this is a first entry that opens threads rather than tying them off, so a listener who wants everything settled inside one file will be waiting on the rest of Men of the Rink. Pass, too, if you buy on credited cast, because the narrator field on this listing is incomplete and no amount of enthusiasm underneath it fills the gap in. Anyone coming for hockey specifically should know the rink is a setting and a job here, not the subject.
Good to Know
How long is the My Pucking Crush audiobook?
Eight hours and twenty-eight minutes, short for a romantic suspense build and about standard for contemporary male-male romance. At that length the Bratva threat and the romance have to advance together rather than in sequence, so expect the danger plot to stay braided into the relationship rather than take it over.
Is this audiobook explicit, and how dark does the plot get?
The description names violence and bloodshed in Luca's past as a Bratva enforcer, along with deadly secrets and a threat aimed at Max. The title is filed under romance and LGBTQ categories with a sports tag, which places it as an adult male-male romance carrying organized crime plotting, not a soft sports story.
Do I need to read another Men of the Rink book first?
No. This is book one, and both leads are introduced from the ground up. Luca's five years of distance from his former life and Max Ryan's position as the team's star defenseman are both established inside this volume, with no prior reading assumed and no earlier entry to catch up on.
