Dirty Little Vow

Dirty Little Vow is one of Lisa Renee Jones’s contemporary romance novels, working in the high heat dark contemporary corner she has built her career around. Jones writes across several romance subgenres but her readers know her best for two things. Her Inside Out series and her wider catalogue across romantic suspense and dark contemporary romance.

The dirty little vow premise hints at the kind of contractual or arrangement based dark romance that Jones has used in some of her work. A vow or commitment that the central characters have made under specific circumstances, with the dirty descriptor pointing to the morally complicated and high heat nature of the arrangement. Jones is good at this kind of premise because she takes the time to make both characters’ situations believable.

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 dark contemporary romance corner is the emotional grounding.

For readers who enjoy Sylvia Day, Maya Banks, J. Kenner, or the high heat end of contemporary romance generally, 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. Dirty Little Vow is a comfortable entry and a fair sample of what she does.