Between the Sheets

Between the Sheets is a 2014 contemporary romance novel written by Molly Fader (under the name Molly O’Keefe). The third volume in the Boys of Bishop series, the book centers upon art teacher Shelby Monroe, first featured in Wild Child (2013). 

Shelby is a part-time art teacher at Bishop Elementary who lives with her mother, Evie, who used to manage the old Del Monte factory and now has Alzheimer’s. When her mother is in the midst of a bad episode, she believes her preacher husband is still alive and demands that Shelby pray with her, but when she is more lucid, she spends her time looking at photographs, “thinking I’ll see what I saw… I’ll see why I married him, why I felt like he was all I deserved.” Shelby herself, growing up with a manipulative narcissist as a father, considers herself undeserving of love, a feeling compounded by the public shaming she received at the end of Wild Child. Consequently, she does not pursue relationships but, instead, occasionally engages in sex with abandon as a means of self-obliteration. 

Single father Wyatt (Ty) Svensson is new in town, doing maintenance and construction for both The Pour House and Cora’s restaurant, while refurbishing motorcycles on the side. Ty himself had an unstable rearing and was briefly involved with the Outlaws biker gang before straightening himself out. Unbeknownst to him, he had a son, Casey, with a former girlfriend, and one day eleven-year-old Casey walked across the bridge from Memphis, Tennessee, to West Memphis (Crittenden County) to seek out Ty. Determined to start their lives anew, Ty moved with Casey to Bishop, settling across the street from Shelby.  

Casey is a shy and somewhat morose kid regularly called to the principal’s office for behavioral issues. In response, Shelby recommends that he try art therapy and offers to include him in her after-school classes held at the Art Barn on her property. Ty asks Shelby out, but Evie has another episode, and distraught, she takes Ty to her nearby art barn, where they drink bourbon and have what Ty later regards as “some of the most intense, conflicted sex of his life,” given that Shelby almost dismisses him afterwards. They meet awkwardly the next day at the local Methodist church.  

At school, some boys who know that Casey is in Shelby’s art class describe her to him as a “slut” and reference events of Wild Child, and Casey ends up in a fight with them and is suspended for the rest of the week. When Ty learns the reason, he goes to Shelby, and they share some of their mutual traumas and have sex with follow-up conversation this time. Later, Ty summons some friends and associates to auction off a motorbike he has refurbished, moving the event from his house to The Pour House. At Cora’s diner the next morning, people begin asking Ty about fixing up their old bikes, as word has spread following the auction, leading Ty to think that maybe he should join the local chamber of commerce and start a garage, as Shelby had suggested. 

In the meantime, Evie has an accident, and Shelby realizes she needs to hire professional help. After weeks of being distant from Ty, she finally comes clean to Ty about the abuse she and her mother endured at the hands of her father, and she comes over for dinner, hoping to have a proper date. That evening, Casey sees Evie out wandering and then being attacked by a stray dog. At the hospital, after learning that her mother would be physically fine but would probably only get worse, she realizes: “What was coming was bad; she knew that. This situation with her mother was only going to get worse, but she didn’t want to lock Ty out anymore.” An epilogue set one year later finds the main characters from the three books in the series thus far, all chipping in to renovate Shelby’s house: “And then it was just the two of them, Ty and Shelby, tearing down the past, getting ready for the future.” 

In the 2016 movie Suicide Squad, based on the DC Comics series created by John Ostrander, the character of Harley Quinn (played by Margot Robbie) can briefly be seen reading a copy of Between the Sheets in her prison cell as she drinks tea. O’Keefe later wrote that she had no idea that her book would be used in this way, but that she loved “the image of the insane and violent and abused Harley reading an angsty domestic romance about two people trying to work it out.” 

For additional information:
O’Keefe, Molly. Between the Sheets. New York: Bantam Books, 2024. 

———. “Harley Quinn’s Choice of Book Says a Lot about Her.” Bustle, August 26, 2016. https://www.bustle.com/articles/180847-harley-quinn-reads-a-romance-novel-in-suicide-squad-and-that-says-a-lot-about (accessed April 16, 2025).  

“Review: Between the Sheets by Molly O’Keefe.” Dear Author. https://dearauthor.com/book-reviews/overall-b-reviews/b-plus-reviews/review-between-the-sheets-by-molly-okeefe/ (accessed April 16, 2025). 

“Review: Molly O’Keefe’s Between the Sheets, ‘A Broken Hallelujah.’” Miss Bates Reads Romance. https://missbatesreadsromance.com/2014/10/04/review-molly-okeefe-between-the-sheets/ (accessed April 16, 2025). 

“Review of Between the Sheets.” All About Romance. https://allaboutromance.com/book-review/between-the-sheets-by-molly-okeefe/ (accessed April 16, 2025). 

Staff of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas