Better Than Safe

Better Than Safe is the third book in Lane Hayes’s Better Than series, the contemporary queer romance project that helped establish her early career. The series began with Better Than Good and continued with Better Than Chance, with each book focusing on a different couple while keeping the wider Manhattan friend group as recurring presences. By this entry the connected world had developed enough that longtime readers came back as much for the recurring characters as for the new central couple in each book.

This novel turns to Paul Fontaine, a wealthy and successful businessman who has spent his adult life being absolutely certain about who he is and what he wants. Paul has been comfortably out as gay for years, he runs a successful company, and he has the kind of orderly personal life that he takes pride in maintaining. Then Paul meets Curt Townsend, a younger and considerably more chaotic man whose presence in his life starts disrupting all of the careful arrangements Paul has built. The novel follows the slow recognition that what Paul thought he wanted from a partner and what he actually needs are not necessarily the same thing.

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, 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 Safe is a satisfying entry. For new readers, the series rewards being read in order starting with Better Than Good, but Better Than Safe can be picked up as a standalone with some loss of context.