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Heated Rivalry author Rachel Reid said that she was “very happy” with the draft of the next book in the series while the show’s creator Jacob Tierney outlined a more “serious” direction for the second season of its television adaptation.
“I’ve been writing it for about a year now. I was working on it secretly right up until January, when it was announced. I like it. I’m very happy with it,” she told Entertainment Weekly about the forthcoming novel titled Unrivaled.
She added that she was taking the “next few months to just really focus on that and nothing else to make it as good as it can possibly be before it goes to my editor”.
Heated Rivalry, published in 2019, is part of Reid’s Game Changers series, and follows rival players Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov whose years-long on-ice competition runs alongside their secret relationship. The story continues in The Long Game, set 10 years into the couple’s relationship as they navigate life together alongside the demands of professional hockey.
Heated Rivalry follows rival players Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov whose on-ice competition runs alongside a secret relationship (HBO)
Reid’s book was adapted for a television series starring Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie as Shane and Ilya, with Jacob Tierney as creator and showrunner. The show includes portions of her 2018 novel Game Changer, which follows American hockey player Scott Hunter’s relationship with a barista called Kip Grady. Hunter is played by François Arnaud and Grady by Robbie GK.
The show premiered in the US in November 2025 to strong audience and critical response and quickly became a cultural phenomenon as well as one of HBO Max’s most-watched new releases. It landed in the UK in January and continued to grow its audience by over 100 per cent after the final episode aired.
“I feel like more than any other book I’ve written, this one needs to be really good. I hope I’m giving people what they want out of this,” Reid said.
“I hope what I want is what other people want. I still am making decisions about the plot with some things.”
Unrivaled is set to continue the story of Hollander and Rozanov after the events of The Long Game, which will serve as the basis for the forthcoming second season of the television series.
Reid announced in February that the novel’s September 2026 release had been pushed to June 2027 due to her worsening symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease.
Jacob Tierney, second from left, and Rachel Reid, extreme right, with the cast at the Heated Rivalry premiere in Toronto (Getty)
Reid shared that Unrivaled would explore the fallout of the central couple’s relationship becoming public after years of secrecy. “This is really where the world’s gonna judge them,” she said. “There’s gonna be people that are extremely excited and supportive of it – some of it in maybe a parasocial way, which isn’t at all based on reality. And there will also be the other side: just blatantly homophobic and bigoted and terrible.”
It will also examine the pressures of balancing a shared personal and professional life, with Reid adding that despite a resolution, “it’s a complicated happy ending”.
The author, along with Tierney, was in New York for BookCon 2026 on Saturday where she talked about the scale of the attention she began to receive after the success of the TV adaptation.
“I have a little bit of regret deciding to write a book at the same time, but I am excited,” she was quoted as saying by USA Today. “I’m in a place where the whole world seems to care about what happens next to these characters or has thoughts about them.”
Heated Rivalry included portions of the novel ‘Game Changer’ which follows US hockey player Scott Hunter’s relationship with barista Kip Grady (HBO)
At the same panel, Tierney described The Long Game as “an emotionally sophisticated book that takes this couple seriously” and said the new season would focus on the realities of “making a relationship a success”.
“It’s different,” Tierney said about the second season, set for release next year. “And the challenge of it, from an adaptation point of view, is that you are in much more serious territory. There is still lots of flirting and lots of sex but this kind of danger, this kind of hotel-room-adolescent-sex stuff is largely gone.”
He said the second season would also incorporate elements from Reid’s novel Role Model, bringing in new characters Troy Barrett and Harris Drover.
“Obviously parts of Role Model are going to be in. But Ilya and Shane are the heartbeat of this series,” he said.
