I remember looking at FORCED MATE and reading an excerpt online when it first came out because hey, what's not to love about intergalactic royal chess sex slaves, but I hadn't realized the full extent of the problems with the execution... And I have mixed feelings about LoveSpell/Dorchester because their willingness to publish books like this one means that sometimes they end up with things that other houses won't publish (because they need too much editing or are just pushing the envelope and breaking the usual romance genre rules in some way) which turn out to be really interesting, although the downside is you often end up with stuff like this series.