RISKY BUSINESS

In a twist on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, a London woman in need of investors for her startup disguises her identity at an innovation competition and falls for the assistant to a wealthy CEO.

Jess Cole is struggling to find investors for her startup, Wyst, a company that focuses on women’s physical- and mental-health issues and access to care. She suspects the problem has more to do with the fact that she’s a woman rather than her business plans. To complicate matters, she was previously at the heart of a workplace scandal when a colleague she was dating spread around intimate photos, and the tech world has proven to be a rather small community. In a last-ditch effort to make her dreams come true, Jess enters TechRumble, a competition to fund budding startups—and convinces her twin brother, Spencer, to pose as the company’s founder while she goes undercover as Violet, his assistant. While things start to look up for the future of Wyst, Jess has a hard time reining Spencer in, and she worries that he’s inadvertently jeopardizing everything by courting the competition judges with promises she can’t possibly fulfill. Oliver Kavanagh works as the assistant to the competition’s wealthy host. He and Jess (as Violet) bond rather quickly and cutely morph from friends to lovers. Working as his cousin’s assistant isn’t the career he wants, and he eventually comes to realize what his professional dreams actually are. Jess’ deception hangs over the story, as she’s potentially sabotaged the sole reason she entered TechRumble in the first place, creating wonderful tension that drives most of the book’s momentum. Jess and Oliver’s romance is simply fine. It’s sweet but slow, and Oliver lacks extra oomph as the leading man.

Better on the tech than the romance.