Beautiful Stranger

Beautiful Stranger is the second book in the Beautiful Bastard series by Christina Lauren, the writing partnership of Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings. The series began with Beautiful Bastard, a fanfiction project that took on a life of its own and turned the duo into one of the bigger names in contemporary romance. Beautiful Stranger spotlights Sara Dillon, a Chicago accountant who moves to New York after a brutal breakup and decides to spend her first weekend in the city making one impulsive decision after another.

The stranger of the title is Max Stella, a charming British financier who picks Sara up at a club and turns one anonymous night into an unexpected ongoing arrangement. The tension that drives the book is not whether they will sleep together. They have done that by chapter three. The tension is whether two people who started by trying to make a relationship as low stakes as possible can manage to keep their feelings out of it. Spoiler. They cannot.

Christina Lauren writes contemporary romance with a particular sense of humor and a willingness to go bigger on the heat than some of their peers. Their dialogue carries a lot of the work and their female leads tend to be funny in a self deprecating way that feels real. Max is one of the writing duo’s best heroes, equal parts charm and genuine affection, and Sara is the kind of heroine who knows what she wants and will not pretend otherwise.

Readers who enjoyed Beautiful Bastard will recognize the world here. The book works as a standalone but rewards readers who have started from the beginning. Christina Lauren went on to write many more books together, including The Unhoneymooners and Love and Other Words, but the Beautiful series is where the partnership found its voice.