Linger

Linger is one of Maya Banks’s contemporary romance novels, working in the territory she has been writing in successfully for nearly two decades. Banks has built her catalogue around emotionally intense relationships, capable heroines, and male leads who are protective without being controlling. Her readers know her for the high heat she brings to all her work and for the careful relationship building that distinguishes her novels from less skilled treatments of similar material.

Linger fits into Banks’s catalogue of contemporary romance, possibly part of one of her connected series or as a standalone in the wider catalogue. The linger title hints at the kind of slow burn dynamic that Banks does well. Two characters whose attraction has been simmering across whatever situation brought them together, neither willing to make the first move, the tension building until something has to break. Banks handles this kind of setup with the practiced confidence of a writer who has been doing it for a long time.

Banks’s heroines tend to be women who have specific reasons for the situations they are in. They are not just bumbling into the plot. They have made choices that turned out to be more complicated than they expected, and the romance grows out of how they deal with the consequences. Her heroes are usually men who recognize what the heroine has been through and who choose to do the patient work of being trustworthy rather than trying to fix anything. The combination is one that her readers return to her for.

What distinguishes Banks 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 rather than manufactured obstacles.

For readers who enjoy Lora Leigh, Lisa Marie Rice, Cherise Sinclair, or Sylvia Day, Maya Banks is in the same general neighborhood. Her catalogue is large enough that picking a starting point can feel daunting, but most of her standalones can be read in any order. Linger is a comfortable read for fans of her contemporary work and a fair sample of what she does best.