Rock 'n' Troll

Grüsh hits the high note, the lights flare hot, and a thousand human voices roar his name. Somewhere under all that sound, one small upstate town keeps tugging at him like a bass line he can’t shake—and so does the woman he walked away from to chase this dream.

Six years ago, he left Harmony Glen with a beat-up guitar, a borrowed van, and a human lover he was sure couldn’t be his true troll mate. He never came back. Not when the band took off. Not when the world finished tearing the curtain down between humans and the monsters who’d always lived beside them. Not even when the town he grew up in turned itself into the poster child for humans-and-nonhumans-figuring-it-out.

Now his brother is getting married, and Grüsh finds himself back on the shores of the lake that still smells like wet stone and pine needles, standing in the same town square where humans clink coffee mugs with ogres and merfolk argue with dryads over zoning laws. And there she is—the only woman he’s ever loved—holding a life that’s grown complicated in all the years he stayed gone.

Harmony Glen has made room for every kind of neighbor, every kind of family. But making room for second chances is messier. Old heartbreak doesn’t vanish just because the world has decided to be kinder, and some wounds—pregnancy loss, struggles with fertility, the quiet terror of wanting a child and not knowing if you’ll get one—live in the body as much as the heart.

Rock ’n’ Troll is a cozy, later-in-life, second-chance monster romance, steamy where it counts and soft where it hurts, set in a town that believes in happily ever afters even when love has to pick its way back through the rubble.