A hockey fan's anger at her sport's culture became a bestselling romance
Rachel Reid loved hockey but felt ashamed of how homophobic its culture was. So she began writing novels about closeted players and what coming out might cost them. The second, Heated Rivalry, drew little notice for almost a year, then grew into a series that has sold over 650,000 copies.
Published in 2019, the novel belongs to Reid's Game Changers series, which began with Game Changer in 2018 through Carina Press, the LGBTQ+ imprint of Harlequin. Reid said in 2023 that the whole series takes aim at the NHL and its culture. Writing it, she kept asking what it would feel like for a player to come out, and then what would ripple outward to his teammates.
The plot pairs two stars drafted in the same year. Shane Hollander, a disciplined and introverted Canadian, plays for Montreal; Ilya Rozanov, a charismatic Russian with a painful family history, plays for Boston. Their secret affair stretches over years, framed by rivalry, fear for their careers and homophobia both in the league and in Russia. Reid named several real influences. The rivalry between Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin shaped the premise, as did HBO's 24/7 coverage of the 2011 Winter Classic. Ilya drew on Kovalchuk, Selänne and Jaromír Jágr; Shane on Wayne Gretzky and Paul Kariya; Ilya's speech on Mikhail Sergachev. Still, she insists she never bases characters directly on real people.
Attention came slowly. Nearly a year after release, the romance novelist Cat Sebastian recommended it online, which Reid called a real turning point. A Washington Post writer later credited the book with hooking her on gay hockey romance, and a 2022 sequel, The Long Game, reached the USA Today list in 2023. Then the Crave television adaptation, debuting on November 28, 2025, sent sales soaring; by December 2025 Harlequin reported more than 650,000 copies sold across the series.
A third Shane and Ilya book, Unrivaled, was meant to arrive on September 29, 2026. In February 2026 Reid postponed it to June 2027, pointing to the demands of sudden fame and worsening Parkinson's disease.
Source: Heated Rivalry (novel)
