Emma Chase's 2013 debut novel opens with Drew Evans holed up in his apartment for a week, unshaven and miserable, insisting he has the flu. He doesn't. A wealthy, spectacularly self-assured investment banker, Drew has spent his adult life closing multimillion-dollar deals by day and taking home whichever woman in Manhattan he settles on by night, and he narrates his own downfall to the reader with relish.
The trouble begins when Katherine Brooks joins his father's investment banking firm as its new associate. Kate is as sharp and as ambitious as Drew is, which makes her a professional rival he cannot dismiss; she is also the first woman to turn him down, which makes her a problem he cannot stop thinking about. Their rivalry plays out through late nights at the office, a fiercely contested account, and an attraction neither of them is willing to concede first.
Told entirely in Drew's snarky, unfiltered first-person voice — complete with asides to the reader — Tangled is a steamy workplace romantic comedy that made Chase's name and launched the four-book Tangled series. Reviewers have consistently split on Drew himself, finding him both genuinely funny and thoroughly badly behaved, which is very much the point of a book about a man learning that the one thing he never wanted is the only thing he cannot live without.
