Lynn Burke, $0.99, ISBN 979-8201818586
Contemporary Romance, 2022

Michael had been a pretty bad alcoholic and junkie for a long time now, and yet, in the opening scene of Lynn Burke’s Unholy Addiction, he’s all buff and ripped as if alcohol and drugs are the new PEDs.

He’s six months sober now, and he and his buddies treat their AA meetings like a hookup bar.

Fresh meat, fucking young as hell to be attending an AA meeting. A tiny little thing compared to me who’d been called a mountain countless times. He wasn’t my usual bear type, but my dick jolted like I’d stuck my finger in a socket.

Untied boots covered his feet, and ripped jeans that appeared soft and buttery ended at his trim bare belly. He wore a pink crop top that stretched over small pec muscles.

What is this? A Village People fan meet? 

Since this is an AA Grindr meet-up, the new guy Chase immediately tells everyone about his abusive daddy driving him to drink since he was a kid, which means it’s perfectly fine and rational for a recovering addict to hook up with another recovering addict. That always ends well, doesn’t it?

Perhaps it helps, sort of, that none of these characters are believable as addicts, recovering or otherwise. They don’t really experience withdrawals or feel tempted to relapse. Everything’s fine, everyone’s perfectly ripped and buff and no one experiences any health issues from their years and years of substance abuse.

It’s fine, people. Addiction here is just another kind of daddy issues, issues that can be easily evaporated by a combo of big hugs, lots of exposition dump, and hot sex among hot people.

Of course, this also means that this story is unconvincing and unbelievable in a vapid way that is also somewhat insulting to my intelligence, but hey, then again, maybe I’m just too worldly and sophisticated to fall into the target audience of this story.

Chalk this one up as an absurdist kind of made-up stuff from an author that strongly suggests that she has no clue what addiction and rehab actually entail.