Better Than Friends

Better Than Friends is the second book in Lane Hayes’s Better Than series, the contemporary queer romance project that helped launch her career. The series began with Better Than Good, the foundational novel that introduced the wider Manhattan friend group, and continues to develop the connected world that the rest of the series would build on. Each Better Than novel focuses on a different couple while keeping the wider cast as recurring presences, and longtime readers come back as much for the recurring characters as for the new central couple in each book.

This novel turns to Curt Townsend, the friend whose wedding plans drove much of the action in Better Than Good, and the new central romance that develops in his life as the wider series advances. Hayes uses the friends to lovers structure that has been one of her signature techniques across her catalogue, with the central pair starting from established friendship that has to be slowly reconfigured into something more. The slow recognition that what has been comfortable friendship might actually have been something else all along drives the emotional arc of the novel.

Lane Hayes writes contemporary queer romance with the kind of emotional honesty and patient plotting that her readers return to her for. The Better Than series gives her room to develop the wider friend group across multiple books, with each novel building on the relationships that the earlier entries established. Her dialogue is sharp, her sensual scenes serve the relationship rather than substitute for it, and her endings tend to feel earned because she has done the work of building the case for the relationship.

What distinguishes Hayes from a lot of her peers is the warmth of her supporting casts and the patience of her plotting. Her books are not the longest in the genre and they do not lean on extended dark themes, but they take the time to make the central romance feel earned. Her couples talk to each other like adults rather than miscommunicate their way through three quarters of the book.

For longtime Better Than series fans, Better Than Friends is a satisfying entry that develops Curt’s story alongside the wider connected world. For new readers, the series rewards being read in order starting with Better Than Good, but Better Than Friends can be picked up as a standalone with some loss of context. Readers who enjoy Riley Hart, N.R. Walker, Garrett Leigh, or Sloane Kennedy will find similar warmth in Hayes’s catalogue.