About

The publisher

I write romance novels for a living. That means I have spent years inside the machinery this site takes apart — the tropes, the beat sheets, the third-act break that arrives on schedule like a train you are somehow still surprised by.

I am the author of the Second Life series, and I review from the working side of the desk. I know what a scene costs to build, so I can tell you when an author paid full price and when they put it on credit. A critic who works inside a genre can also tell you where the wiring runs.

The desks

The Romance Review is the flagship and the desk currently publishing — reviews, trope autopsies, reading guides, and industry dispatches. Behind it, six desks are being fitted out, each with the same brief in a different genre:

• The Signal — Science fiction, taken seriously.
• The Second Moon — Fantasy, taken seriously.
• The Locked Room — Mysteries, taken seriously.
• The Dead Drop — Thrillers, taken seriously.
• The Cellar Door — Horror, taken seriously.
• The Long Century — Historical fiction, taken seriously.

Every one of them will do for its shelf what the flagship does for romance: take the genre seriously, take the reader seriously, and never confuse the two with taking itself seriously.

The standards

A few house rules, kept in public so you can hold me to them.

Sharp about the books, warm about why we read them. A review here will tell you plainly when a book is broken and exactly which part failed. It will never sneer at you for wanting the book to work. Loving a trope is not a lapse in taste; it is the reason criticism of that trope is worth writing.

No free-book bribes. The newsletter will never dangle a free novel to harvest your address. You subscribe because the pieces are worth reading, or you close the tab — both are respectable outcomes.

No spam. Several new pieces a month across the desks, and nothing else. Your inbox has suffered enough.

Honest links. When a piece links to a retailer, the link may earn this site a commission. It changes nothing about what gets recommended — a broken book stays broken with a shop at the end of the link or without one. Every such link is marked as sponsored where it stands.

Spoilers are handled like live ammunition. Reviews and guides work at the premise level. The whole point of sending you to a book is that the book still has its secrets when you arrive.

Say hello

The newsletter is where the work lands first. Publishers and authors interested in reaching this readership can start at the advertising page. And if you simply want to argue about whether the grand gesture is ever proportionate to the crime, the comments are open on every piece.

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I look forward to disagreeing with you in the warmest possible way.
— Riley Locke