I’ve come to the Fake Boyfriend series completely backwards, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
By the time I picked up Fake Out, the first book in Eden Finley’s series, I’d already spent ten books in the Puckboys universe and met Damon King as a fully formed adult: sharp suit, sharper instincts, the guy who corners struggling party boy Oskar Voyjik’s new PR manager Lane Pierce in Shameless Puckboy and offers him a job at King Sports Agency. He’s polished. He’s a little intimidating. He clearly has his life together.
READ MORE: Here’s where to start with the Puckboys series
So starting Fake Out and meeting a much younger, much more chaotic version of that same man has been genuinely fun. This is Damon before King Sports even exists.
The set-up is classic Finley: Maddox O’Shay fled his hometown of Clover Vale, Pennsylvania, for New York five years earlier after telling his childhood sweetheart he was gay to escape a marriage he didn’t want. Now he’s been invited back for her wedding, and he needs a fake boyfriend to bring with him — which is how he ends up bribing Damon, his best friend Stacy’s brother, into spending forty-eight hours pretending to be in love with him. Damon only agrees because Maddox can get him a meeting with a potential client. This is a man building King Sports one favour at a time, years before we see him running it.
The baseball injury that ends Damon’s playing career and pushes him into sports agency work in the first place is mentioned early, which retroactively explains a lot about the guy who later builds an entire agency out of representing NHL players who can’t safely come out. He’s protective of his clients in Puckboys because he’s lived the “career-ending, life-altering moment” version of professional sport himself.
What I didn’t expect was how much of the wider universe is already seeded in book one. Stacy King who is Damon’s sister and Maddox’s best friend since their university days, works alongside Maddox at Parsons Media, a New York ad agency, which is its own neat little world-building beat. Maddox’s brother-in-law Tommy Novak (married to his sister Jacie) is best friends with Ollie Strömberg — who I already knew from Puckboys as a member of the NHL Queer Collective. Two books, two authors, one wedding-adjacent family tree.
Fake Out also debuts couples who get their own books later in the series: Matt Jackson and Noah Huntington III (who go on to headline Trick Play), Aron Roe and Wyatt Black (Rebound), and Ollie Strömberg, who gets his own book in Deke before he’s ever the established Puckboys regular I met first. It’s the same trick Finley and her co-writer Saxon James pull off in Puckboys: everyone’s already in each other’s orbit before they’ve earned their own spotlight.
Which brings me to the flowchart. If you’ve ever tried to explain the combined Eden Finley/Saxon James universe to someone who hasn’t read any of it, you’ll understand why fans needed an actual diagram to map it out. The one going around — nicknamed “the Sadenverse mess,” and for good reason — colour-codes every series by author: Finley’s solo work (Fake Boyfriend, Famous, CU Hockey, Mike Bravo Ops, Headstrong) on one side, Saxon James’s solo series (Divorced Men’s Club, Frat Wars, Accidental Love, Dating Disaster, Football Royalty, Can’t Say Goodbye) on the other, and the books they’ve written together (Puckboys, Up in Flames, Bastard and the Heir) sitting in between as the join. Dashed arrows loop back and forth across the whole thing for the character cameos that don’t respect series boundaries at all — Fake Boyfriend curling into Puckboys being exactly the kind of crossover that got me here in the first place.
It’s a lot. It is, genuinely, a mess. I look forward to making my way through the series... eses, plural, apparently indefinitely.
Next up: Trick Play, then Rebound, Deke, Blindsided, Hat Trick and the Final Play novella — and, somewhere well beyond that, the rest of the complex Sadenverse.