Bad Deeds

Bad Deeds is one of Lisa Renee Jones’s contemporary romance novels, possibly part of her Dirty Money series, working in the high heat romantic suspense corner she has built her career around. Jones writes across several romance subgenres but her readers know her best for the dark contemporary erotic romance that her Inside Out series helped popularize.

The bad deeds premise hints at the kind of crime adjacent or morally complicated romance that Jones has used in some of her work. A central character whose actions or whose family’s actions have crossed into the bad deeds territory, with the central romance developing alongside the wider situation that the bad deeds have produced. Jones is good at this kind of premise because she takes both halves of it seriously.

Jones’s prose is brisk and her plots move. Her chapters end with hooks, her dialogue carries real chemistry, and her sex scenes are explicit and frequent in the way her readers expect.

For readers who enjoy Sylvia Day, Maya Banks, J. Kenner, or the high heat end of contemporary romance generally, Lisa Renee Jones is squarely in the same neighborhood. Bad Deeds is a comfortable entry and a fair sample of what she does best in the romantic suspense corner.