Dangerous Secrets

Dangerous Secrets is one of Lisa Renee Jones’s romantic suspense novels, working in the territory she has built her career around. Jones writes across multiple romance subgenres but her readers know her best for two things. Her Inside Out series, which made her one of the early voices in the wave of dark contemporary erotic romance. And her romantic suspense work, which combines the high heat of her erotic fiction with thriller plotting and the kind of dangerous male leads who keep her readers turning pages.

The dangerous secrets premise hints at the kind of setup Jones handles well. A heroine with a past she has been carefully hiding. A hero whose own secrets are running on a parallel track to hers. And a slow building threat that forces them to trust each other before either of them is sure they should. Jones is good at this kind of story because she takes the time to make both characters’ reasons for their secrecy believable. They are not just being mysterious for the sake of mystery. They have specific situations they have been trying to manage, and the unraveling of those situations is what drives the plot forward.

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. What distinguishes her from a lot of her peers in the high heat romantic suspense corner is the emotional grounding. Her characters tend to have real interior lives and real reasons for the choices they make, and the romance carries weight because she has done the work of building it.

For readers who enjoy Sylvia Day, Maya Banks, J. Kenner, or the high heat end of Karen Rose’s catalogue, Lisa Renee Jones is squarely in the same neighborhood. Her catalogue is large enough that picking a starting point can feel daunting, but most of her standalones work in any order. Dangerous Secrets is a comfortable entry and a fair sample of what she does best.