Golden Eyes

Golden Eyes is one of Maya Banks’s paranormal romance novels, working in the shapeshifter subgenre that has been a steady part of her catalogue alongside her better known contemporary erotic and romantic suspense work. Banks has been one of the most prolific and successful writers in romance for nearly two decades, with a catalogue spanning contemporary, paranormal, historical, romantic suspense, and her well regarded body of menage and BDSM fiction.

The golden eyes title hints at the shapeshifter or supernatural premise the novel works with, where a particular eye color often signals the otherworldly nature of one of the central characters. Banks’s paranormal romance tends to focus on protective male leads with supernatural natures, and capable heroines who find themselves drawn into worlds they did not know existed. Her shapeshifter heroes are dangerous in believable ways, with specific reasons for the lives they have built, specific enemies who want them dead, and specific limits that the relationship is going to have to navigate.

What distinguishes Banks’s paranormal romance from a lot of her peers is the emotional grounding. Her sex scenes are explicit and frequent, but they are almost always in service of relationships that have weight to them, and her readers come back to her in part for the way her heat scenes carry actual emotional information rather than just physical action. The dialogue tends to be direct and the conflicts feel like real adult problems even when the supernatural elements are at the center of the plot.

For readers who enjoy J.R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood, Larissa Ione’s Demonica series, Kresley Cole’s Immortals After Dark, or Nalini Singh’s shapeshifter work, Maya Banks is squarely in the same neighborhood. Her catalogue is large enough that picking a starting point can feel daunting. The KGI series, the Sweet series, the Surrender trilogy, and the Slow Burn series are all entry points to different corners of her work. Golden Eyes is a comfortable read for fans of her paranormal work and a fair sample of what she does best in the supernatural romance corner of her wider career.