Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Tainted Love Duet: Blow and Crush | - | Kim Karr | N/A |
| 2 | Blow | 2015 | Kim Karr | Buy |
| 3 | Crush | 2015 | Kim Karr | Buy |
The Tainted Love Duet splits its story across two books, Blow and Crush, with the duet edition collecting them as a single volume. The setup is typical of Kim Karr’s darker work: two people drawn together despite circumstances that make the relationship complicated, with enough attraction to keep them from staying away from each other.
Blow, the opening book, establishes the central conflict and introduces the messy emotional territory both characters are navigating. Crush picks up directly from where the first book leaves off, pushing the relationship to its resolution. Because the story is designed as a continuous arc rather than two self-contained novels, reading in order matters here.
Readers who enjoy the more intense, emotionally charged side of Karr’s writing, closer in tone to the Connections series than to her later comedy-forward books, will find the Tainted Love Duet a good fit. The stakes feel genuine, and the emotional payoff in Crush rewards readers who stuck with the tension of Blow.