Romance heroines are rarely allowed to be eccentric. They are allowed to be bookish, occasionally clumsy, professionally competent in nonthreatening ways — but genuinely, specifically odd, in ways that make other people in the narrative slightly puzzled by them?
Kristen Ashley has one of the most devoted readerships in romance fiction, and the reason is not complicated: she writes alpha heroes with a specific quality that is very hard to describe without sounding reductive, and that quality is immediately identifiable to the readers who love it.
The fake relationship romance tends to succeed or fail on the quality of the central pairing: if the two people are genuinely different in ways that are interesting rather than merely contrasting, and if the dynamic they develop in proximity feels earned rather than manufactured, the premise delivers on its premise.
Abby Jimenez occupies a specific corner of contemporary romance: she writes emotional, sometimes very funny novels about people who are competent adults managing difficult lives, and her great skill is making the warmth and the depth coexist without either undermining the other.
Julie James writes romantic suspense that leads with wit, and Something About You — the first in her FBI/US Attorney series — is the best demonstration of what that means.
Karen Rose’s debut novel begins with a premise that asks more of its reader than most romantic suspense does: Mary Grace Winters has faked her own death to escape an abusive husband, has been in hiding for six years, and is now trying to be a whole person again in Chicago with her young son.
Romantic suspense has a reputation for grim, which is not unearned — the subgenre lives at the intersection of attraction and danger, and writers often lean into the darkness because that is where the tension is.
The marriage of convenience romance has a long and distinguished history, but Maisey Yates found a variation of it in
The brother’s best friend trope has deep roots in romance for a reason that is not complicated: the combination of
Elsie Silver writes cowboys who are inconvenient in a very specific way: they notice things. They don’t perform sensitivity or deploy emotional intelligence as a seduction tactic.