Heated Rivalry fans will have to wait eight months longer for the next novel featuring hockey players Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov.
Rachel Reid announced that the publication date for Unrivaled, the planned seventh installment in her Game Changers series of gay-themed hockey romance novels, has been pushed back from Sept. 29, 2026, to June 1, 2027. She said the cause of the delay is the worsening of her symptoms from Parkinson’s disease.
The Game Changers series debuted in 2018 with Game Changer; the second installment in the series, Heated Rivalry, was published the following year. That novel introduced readers to Hollander and Rozanov, two rival hockey players who fall in love with each other.
The series forms the basis for the blockbuster series Heated Rivalry, which airs in the U.S. on HBO Max, and stars Hudson Williams as Hollander and Connor Storrie as Rozanov.
In an Instagram video, Reid said, “I first of all just wanted to say thank you to everyone for the last few months. It’s been absolutely incredible. I can’t really put into words what this feels like for an author….I really appreciate all the love for Ilya and Shane and all my other characters in my books.”
She continued, “It’s also been very, very busy and overwhelming….It’s also taken away my ability to have quality time to write. There’s nothing more important to me than Unrivaled being the best book it can possibly be….When good things happen, sometimes the universe hands you some worse stuff to balance it out, and for me, that’s been that my Parkinson’s symptoms have gotten a bit worse, and it’s made it difficult physically to write, so I’m definitely a lot slower, and that’s just something I need to learn how to navigate and kind of face instead of ignoring….I do think that this book will be worth the wait.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
