Huge Deal

Huge Deal is the third book in Lauren Layne’s 21 Wall Street series, the contemporary romance trilogy set in the world of New York finance that began with Hot Asset and continued with Hard Sell. The series follows three best friends who work at the same investment management firm. Each book focuses on one of the friends finding his way to the right woman while the wider professional world of high stakes Manhattan finance provides the backdrop.

This entry belongs to Kennedy Dawson, the most polished and most carefully controlled of the three friends, who has been quietly in love with his best friend Ian Bradley’s older sister Kate Henley for as long as anyone has known him. Kate is a divorced single mother with a teenage daughter and absolutely no interest in dating any of her younger brother’s friends, and Kennedy has been respecting her boundaries even as the longing has built across years. When circumstances force the two of them into closer professional contact than either has been comfortable with, the slow build that has been simmering since long before the novel begins finally has to come to some kind of crisis.

Lauren Layne writes contemporary romance the way some people make pasta. The ingredients are simple and traditional but the execution makes the difference. Her dialogue snaps. Her chemistry is built through pages of actual conversation rather than just attraction at first sight. Her characters tend to have real careers and real concerns about those careers, and the work scenes feel researched rather than fudged. The age gap and the brother’s best friend dynamics in this novel are handled with the kind of care that makes them work as romance rather than as awkward complications.

The 21 Wall Street universe extends across the trilogy and into some of Layne’s later standalones, with the friend group that anchors the series providing the kind of recurring cast that her readers love returning to. For longtime Layne fans, Huge Deal is a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy. For new readers, the series rewards being read in order, but Huge Deal can be picked up as a standalone with the central romance fully resolved within the book.