Better Than Good

Better Than Good is the first book in Lane Hayes’s Better Than series, the contemporary queer romance project that helped launch her career. Published in 2014, the novel introduces the wider Manhattan friend group that the rest of the series would develop. Aaron Mendez is a model and aspiring photographer who has been moving through the New York gay scene with the kind of casual confidence that his good looks and his easy charm make possible. Matt Sullivan is the best friend of Aaron’s longtime friend Curt, an attorney whose buttoned up professional life and his closeted situation have kept him at a careful distance from any kind of relationship that might disrupt either.

When Aaron and Matt are thrown together by Curt’s wedding planning, the slow recognition that the chemistry between them is more complicated than either expected drives the novel forward. Matt has reasons for the careful life he has built. Aaron has been moving through relationships at the kind of speed that has prevented anything from getting too serious. Both of them have to figure out whether what is developing is worth the changes it would require.

Lane Hayes writes contemporary queer romance with the kind of emotional honesty and patient plotting that her readers return to her for. Better Than Good was her first novel and shows the voice already in place that would carry across many subsequent books in the Better Than series and beyond. 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 readers new to Lane Hayes, Better Than Good is the natural starting point for her catalogue. The Better Than series continues with several more novels, each focused on a different couple in the wider friend group, and longtime readers come back for the recurring cast as much as for the new central romances.