Closed Door Romance Database

A free closed door romance database of 68 books across 7 genres, searchable, with no account and no paid tier. It is not for you if you want someone else's top ten: you set the filters and it shows what fits.

Every heat rating names the author, publisher or listing it came from, and anything nobody has stated says so instead of guessing.

The filters are the whole tool rather than a preview of one. The heat filter starts on closed door only, so pick a genre, a trope, or both, and open any book for its rating, its source and its blurb.

It is built for readers who want the slow burn, the enemies to lovers and the found family without the explicit scenes, across space opera, romantasy, contemporary, historical and suspense alike.

On the science fiction shelf you can also filter for human only, no aliens.

The five sourced shelves behind this database

Nothing here was scraped.

Each book was written up on one of five pages, with the sentence its rating came from quoted underneath it and a link to where that sentence was read.

Read them to see how a rating was reached, not just what it says.

• Closed door contemporary romance for the small town, the fake date and the wedding, twenty titles with eighteen stated sources.
• Closed door historical romance across Regency, Victorian and frontier, where the same ballroom can hold a fade to black kiss or an explicit scene and the cover tells you neither.
• Closed door romantasy and fantasy romance, the hardest shelf of the five to fill honestly, because most of what drives romantasy is open door.
• Closed door romantic suspense and cozy mystery romance, where a book can carry a body count and still keep every intimate scene off the page.
• Closed door science fiction romance, which is where this site started and where the human only filter matters most.

How each heat rating gets decided

Each label is set one of three ways, and the book tells you which.

The strongest is an author stating it plainly, because authors who write closed door on purpose almost always say so.

Next is a publisher whose listing states there is no explicit content.

Last is our own reading of a retail listing, which is written on the card as an estimate rather than a fact.

Anything with no stated source at all is marked heat not stated.

Those books are kept out of the list until you tick the box that brings them in, and the box says to vet them before you buy. There are 26 of them in here today.

Closed door is the one heat level on the scale that makes a promise about every scene in the book rather than about the average of them.

That is why it is the filter this shelf starts on.

An open door romance can carry exactly the same tropes and exactly the same emotional payoff; it simply shows the scene.

Closed door is not a genre either. There is a closed door romcom, a closed door historical, a closed door romantic suspense and a closed door space opera on this shelf, and the tone of those four has almost nothing in common.

Closed door, clean and sweet are three different promises

Closed door describes one thing: where the intimate scenes happen.

Fade to black and no spice mean the same.

Clean and sweet usually describe the tone of the whole book, including its language and its violence, which is a much wider claim.

A closed door romance can still carry war, grief and moral compromise. The door being shut says nothing about the rest of the story being gentle, so the two filters are kept apart here rather than merged into one. what the closed door label promises sets out the difference in full.

What to do when no source states the door

Check the author’s own site first, then the publisher’s listing, then the content notes if the book has any. If the marketing avoids naming a heat level anywhere, treat that as the answer.

Then read a sample before you spend anything.

What each rating on the scale actually means is set out in where this sits on the spice scale, and the sci fi romance glossary defines every trope name on the filters.

The rest of the reader tools

If you want the science fiction shelf specifically, with the human only and aliens filters attached, a shelf built from the tropes you pick covers it.

If you would rather answer for a mood than a genre, try what to read next.

And once you have picked something, how long that book will actually take you measures your own reading speed and turns the page count into evenings.

Our own entry is the one book here you can test for nothing.

Start with the free opening chapters, with the standalone with a guaranteed happy ending behind it, and the content warnings so nothing in it arrives as a surprise.