👏🏼 Praise for hard count
- KIRKUS Reviews: Awarded the book a "Get It" recommendation, calling it "a charged sports romance that skillfully tackles such heavy themes as abuse, the misuse of power, and antigay bigotry".
- BookLife by Publishers Weekly: Described it as a "dark, funny, explicit football romance and melodrama," noting that it offers a "red-hot look at the tumultuous and toxic lives of pro footballers".
- Publishers Weekly: Highlighted that the "sex opera" tagline sets expectations, but Malone "digs deeper in this story about reclaiming choice and learning what safe love feels like".
- Awards: The novel was named a 2026 NYC Big Book Award Distinguished Favorite for LGBTQ Fiction.
WTF IS A SEX OPERA?
A sex opera is a form of maximalist storytelling: heightened emotion, tangled relationships, music, spectacle, and elaborate sexual set pieces that move the plot.
Sex is never an intermission. It changes the balance of power, exposes secrets, deepens love, or detonates everything.
Its creative DNA includes the dynastic warfare of Yellowstone and Giant, the operatic sweep of Gone with the Wind, the glamour and collapse of Valley of the Dolls, the camp ambition of Showgirls, the erotic danger of Basic Instinct and Eyes Wide Shut, the brutal football theater of Any Given Sunday, and the color, music, ritual, and menace of Suspiria.
It also draws from grand opera, soap operas, classic bonkbusters, erotic thrillers, and pop music. Songs function like arias. Desire becomes spectacle. Feelings flow naturally, but in a heightened world.
The Piper Ashton Saga is a gay football sex opera filled with forbidden love, obscene wealth, family secrets, suspense, humor, music, trauma, and sex elaborate enough to require its own choreography.
This is melodrama with emotional intelligence. Erotica with consequences, and prestige storytelling mid-orgasm.
Hope this helps.
Xoxo,
Lucas
The saga continues...
The Tight End and Hail Mary complete The Piper Ashton Saga, Lucas Malone’s gay football Sex Opera. Piper Ashton and Noah Reyes are fighting for a life that belongs to them. Everyone else wants control, a cut, and a piece of their asses.
The trilogy reaches its climax. Does Piper?
Piper Ashton Saga Book 2:
The Tight End
Piper will rise again on Good Friday 2027.
Piper Ashton Saga Book 3: Hail Mary
Get stuffed on Thanksgiving Day 2027.
Vivienne Cross Saga Book 1:
Bitch, Breathe
She's taking ten percent and giving zero fucks on Valentine's Day 2028.
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WHO THE FUCK IS LUCAS MALONE?
Lucas Malone writes glossy novels that feel like Thelma & Louise put the keys in their 1966 Ford Thunderbird and, instead of driving off a cliff, drove straight into a power plant across the street from a Birkin factory.
When he isn’t writing, he watches too many movies and football and pretends to live a normal life, collecting material for the continuing Piper Ashton Saga.
Contact Lucas: lucas@lucasmalone.com
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