Rating: ★★★★★

Genre: Dark Romance

Available On: Amazon (though I highly recommend the Audiobooks)

I came across The Risk by S.T. Abby quite by accident after falling down a dark romance rabbit hole that began with Haunting Adeline and ended with me accidentally writing dark romance myself. At the time, I was looking for something in the same general arena that featured the same highly compelling dual POV I’d enjoyed so much in the Cat and Mouse duet, specifically one in which the MMC’s perspective carried relatively equal weight to the FMC’s. I wanted a male lead with real depth, a proper character arc, and a genuinely compelling POV of his own. Prior to Zade, I’d honestly never read a dual POV series I particularly enjoyed, and I actively avoided books with that setup. After reading the Mindf*ck series, which begins with The Risk, I was fully sold on how good this format can be. So much so that the novel I was working on at the time turned into a dual POV too. That trend has held. It’s now my favourite format, and this series is a huge part of why.

The Risk is book one in S.T. Abby’s Mindfuck series, a run of five short, cliffhanger-heavy dark romantic thrillers built around Lana Myers, a vigilante serial killer, and Logan Bennett, the FBI profiler hunting the murders she’s committing. It was first published in 2016, and even now the hook is still absurdly effective: he’s looking for a monster, and he has absolutely no idea he’s falling for her.

What Is The Risk By S.T. Abby About?

At its simplest, The Risk is about two highly competent people, each consumed by their own mission, colliding by chance. Logan is obsessive about catching killers. Lana is obsessively killing people. He has dedicated his life to justice. She has dedicated hers to becoming what the justice system failed to be.

That setup is catnip on its own, but what makes The Risk work is that S.T. Abby doesn’t waste time. She drops us straight into motion. Lana is already active. Logan is already brilliant. The case is already alive. The attraction hits quickly, but the book never lets you forget that this isn’t a normal romance setup. 

It’s a romance unfolding inside an active manhunt, and that gives the whole thing a constant, delicious pressure. 

Even the blurb understands exactly what the real hook is: not just that Lana is killing, but that Logan doesn’t know the killer is the girl in his bed.

The Risk: Plot Summary

If you want to avoid spoilers, skip to the next section. The rest of the blog will still make sense.

Still here? Good. Here’s what actually happens.

The Risk opens with Lana Meyers sitting in a coffee shop being pestered by an arrogant man she has absolutely no interest in entertaining, while checking the camera footage she planted in her next victim’s house.

She goes to pay for her coffee, only to find it’s covered. The mysterious coffee fairy turns out to be Logan Bennett, the friend of the idiot who was hitting on her. Lana tries to return the money, Logan lightly pokes at how defensive she is, profiling her. Only to be bemused when she profiles him right back. He pushes a little too far, realises it, apologises, gives her his card, and tells her to call him if she ever wants to “live a little.”

After they leave, Lana looks down and sees the FBI logo on the card.

She heads to the isolated house of her next victim, Ben Harris. Gearing up properly, with gloves, heavy men’s boots, and the weighted bag she uses to disguise her build and tracks. She sneaks in through the back, waits for him to come out of the shower, and drops him immediately. When he starts panicking and offering her money, Lana tells him the only thing she wants is for him to know her name.

She speaks back to him words she recalls him saying to her years ago. He realises who she is, and that she survived. She tells him he got three turns on her, so now he loses three pounds of flesh over three days.

From there, we cut to Logan and his FBI team examining what she’s done. 

Ben Harris’s body has been mutilated, tortured for days, and staged with blood smeared across the walls, matching the earlier murders. Because of the size-twelve men’s footprints, the apparent weight distribution, and the sheer force used to overpower physically strong men, they assume they’re looking for a male unsub. Some of them theorise he’s a gay man with a grudge against this specific group of victims, all of whom came from the same tiny, deeply religious town.

Then Lana calls him.

They talk for half an hour, flirt easily, and arrange breakfast for the next morning. The instant Logan hangs up, he texts Hadley to run a background check on Lana. Hadley comes back with nothing. Lana is clean.

Breakfast doesn’t go smoothly, because of course it doesn’t. Lana turns up, waits, wonders if she’s been stood up, and questions her own decision to call him at all. Logan eventually arrives late, apologises, and the two of them settle into easy conversation. Lana partially lies about her dead parents, saying they died in a car accident. Before the date can really become anything, Logan gets called away by work and has to leave. Lana is left sitting there thinking, with perfect bitter irony, that apparently murdering people is easier than dating.

Meanwhile, her revenge plan keeps moving.

Lana starts setting up for Tyler, another man from the group. She plants more cameras in his house, studies his routines, and learns that he’s cheating on his wife with a woman called Denise. While she’s doing all this, Logan is texting her, trying to make plans, and the two of them start building a relationship in the cracks between his casework and her surveillance schedule.

Lana isn’t doing any of this alone. Jake, her best friend, is the one helping her with the hacking, the security systems, the identity cleanup, the logistics.

The book also starts feeding us flashbacks to what happened to Lana before she became Lana. In one of the most brutal snippets, we see Ben, Tyler, and Kyle during the original assault. We hear Ben taunting ‘Victoria’, hear Tyler being told to hold her down, hear Kyle talking while she tries not to scream.

Lana Meyers was once Victoria Evans.

On Logan’s side, the investigation keeps tightening. He and his team keep working both the mutilation murders and a separate case involving another serial killer called the Boogeyman. The team also begin to realise the town they’re investigating is hiding something. The sheriff is obstructive, adamant there are “no gays” in his town, and everyone they question seems to be sticking to the same script.

At the same time, Logan and Lana keep getting pulled closer together. They text constantly. Lana admits to herself that if Logan had come into her life earlier, maybe she could have stopped. But he didn’t, and now she’s already halfway through her kill list. He catches killers. She is one.

Late in the novel, we get the fuller truth of Lana’s identity. Victoria Evans survived the assault, but the life she had before did not. Kennedy Carlyle, an heiress, died in a car accident the same night Victoria’s death certificate was signed. With Jake’s help, Victoria left the hospital under Kennedy’s identity and eventually became Lana Meyers. We also learn just how long this revenge mission has been in the making: years of mourning, rage, martial arts training, rebuilding physical strength, relearning how to tolerate touch, investigating the truth, finding the men, and planning out a schedule of one kill per month.

The cliffhanger is not Logan discovering she’s the killer, but Lana’s false identity starting to crack as Hadley turns up at her door asking why she stole the identity of Kennedy Carlyle.

The Thing That Surprised Me Most Was Logan

Lana is obviously the headline draw. She’s a serial killer. She’s on a revenge mission. She’s competent, strategic, and morally miles more interesting than the vast majority of so-called ‘strong female leads’ romance gives us. But what genuinely made this book sing for me was Logan.

Logan immediately strikes you as a complex yet deceptively simple character. On the one hand, he’s highly intelligent, analytical, great at his job, loyal to his friends, emotionally intelligent, and fully capable of getting inside the minds of the most depraved serial killers going without devolving into anything that even remotely resembles them. He’s got a strict moral code, a clear moral compass, and no confusion over what constitutes right and wrong. His pursuit of justice, and the way he bends his intellectual gifts towards stopping the worst kinds of criminals, is the core of his whole being.

That’s the complexity.

The simplicity of Logan is that he’s never met anyone who can really understand that single-minded devotion to his work and love him without asking him to be less of what he is. He’s never met anyone who can accept that he will always give huge parts of himself to the job. And then Lana walks in and, almost immediately, proves she can hold her own with him. She isn’t dazzled by the posturing of the guy he’s with. She isn’t trying too hard. She isn’t impressed by the usual nonsense. She just clicks with him.

That’s what makes Logan so effective in this book. He isn’t flashy. He’s not written like he knows he’s a fantasy. He’s the most unassumingly sexy MMC I’ve read in a while, which honestly feels exactly right for him.

Why The Romance Works So Well

One of the smartest choices S.T. Abby makes in The Risk is that Lana and Logan’s connection doesn’t begin because she deliberately targeted him. It happens by accident. That matters.

Had Lana been trying to get close to him from the beginning to find out what he knew, it would have undermined their connection straight away. Instead, the setup feels refreshing precisely because it isn’t convoluted. They run into each other. Sparks fly. The danger comes later.

That chance collision lets the series establish its central dynamic without poisoning it. Lana knows Logan is investigating her. Logan has no idea the woman he’s started talking to is the killer he’s hunting. 

For such a short book, and one that absolutely delivers on spice, The Risk still manages to give them a properly slow-burn start. They meet, they flirt, they text, they keep trying to see each other, and Logan’s work repeatedly pulls him away. He assumes Lana will lose patience. She doesn’t, because she has her own world, her own mission, and her own momentum. They fall for each other hard, but the book gives that fall room to develop instead of just smashing them together and calling it chemistry.

That’s part of why this opener works so well. It doesn’t feel like a complete romance arc awkwardly crammed into novella length. It feels like ignition.

S.T. Abby Handled The Structure Brilliantly

This is where I think The Risk punches far above its size.

S.T. Abby essentially takes a very recognisable romance arc and stretches it across the whole five-book series, while still making each instalment feel like it has a job to do. If you’re at all familiar with fictional beat sheets, you can absolutely recognise the opening punches of a romance structure here. But while the romance starts to sizzle away in the background, the thriller plot is doing equally heavy lifting.

That’s what keeps the book from feeling thin.

The Risk is essentially an introduction to two worlds and two sides of the same situation. We see Lana at work. We see Logan at work. We watch each of them operate in their own sphere while the slow entanglement between those spheres becomes the real source of tension. And although the novel ends on a killer cliffhanger, it still delivers a payoff before it boots you off the edge. That’s not easy in a novella. But it’s a huge part of why this series is so compulsively bingeable.

The Audiobook Is Also Excellent

If you’re a fan of audiobooks, I can highly recommend the whole Mindfuck series, obviously starting with The Risk. That’s how I first read these, and I’ve relistened to them twice more since, while also reading the physical books once I bought the omnibus. Both narrators nail their character voices perfectly.

Marie Hawkins has a slightly haunting edge to her voice that is honestly perfect for Lana Myers. TJ Clark makes Logan effortlessly sexy without devolving into that ridiculous deep-voice theatre some male romance narration falls into. Which, again, feels right for Logan. 

Does The Risk Deserve The Hype?

For me, yes.

I can absolutely see why parts of this series won’t work for everyone. I mean, yes, check your trigger warnings because the level of darkness here will definitely put some people off. But beyond that, the dialogue can veer into the ridiculous, and the prose can be a little raw. I don’t find that problematic, it gives the novel its grit. But I can see it would grate for some people. When I first read it I simply loved it, but having read a lot more dark romance since, and come back to it, I can see there’s a slightly chaotic older-dark-romance energy to it. If you’re more familiar with recent books in the genre, you could easily bounce off this one hard. 

None of that stopped this book working for me. The Risk is sharp, compulsive, feral, and completely unashamed of the fantasy it’s serving. It isn’t polished, mannered, literary darkness. 

But it’s not trying to be. 

What I loved most about The Risk is that it sets up the entire series with confidence. It doesn’t spend forever begging you to care. It just hands you Lana, hands you Logan, lights the fuse, and trusts the collision to do the work. And because both POVs matter, because both characters feel like actual protagonists rather than one person’s love interest and one person’s plot device, it lands harder than most dark romance openers ever manage.

The Risk is short, but oh so sweet. Dark, clever, addictive, and a ridiculously effective introduction to one of the most bingeable series I’ve read in this genre.