Somewhere in our search logs is the query "spicy romance novels marriage contract fake relationship very explicit recommendations". Someone typed all of that into a search box, which tells you something true about how romance readers actually shop: not by genre, and not really by author, but by a precise cocktail of tropes and heat. That is a filter, not a search term — and this is how to build one.
Why searching by trope beats searching by title
"Books like Icebreaker" is the most common way people ask for a recommendation, and it is a blunt instrument. Icebreaker is a grumpy-sunshine, forced-proximity, high-heat college hockey romance with a strong friend group. Any given readalike list will match two or three of those and miss the rest, and you cannot tell which from the blurb.
Filtering gets you the ones that match the specific parts you cared about. The catalogue here tags every book on four axes — subgenre, trope, heat level and setting — so you can stack them.
Start with one anchor, then narrow twice
The method that works is: pick one subgenre as the anchor, add the trope that actually hooked you, then set heat last.
Order matters because of how the numbers collapse. Contemporary alone is 9,438 books — useless. Enemies-to-lovers alone is 2,638 — still useless. But contemporary plus grumpy-sunshine plus spicy is 103 books, which is a shelf you can actually stand in front of.
Two filters is usually the sweet spot. Three is right when you know exactly what you want. Four almost always returns nothing, and the temptation then is to remove the trope — remove the subgenre instead. The trope is what you actually care about.
Eight filters worth stealing
Each of these opens the catalogue with the filters already applied. Adjust from there.
Grumpy-sunshine contemporary, high heat
The single most-requested combination in romance, and the reason Icebreaker and Twisted Love both worked. One lead is closed off, the other is relentlessly warm, and the book is the thaw. Setting the heat filter is what separates this from the sweeter end of the same trope.
Hockey romance, high heat
The tightest useful filter on the site. Hockey has become its own subgenre rather than a setting within sports romance, and adding heat cuts out the closed-door and YA-adjacent end. Thirty-seven books is a year of reading. See also our hockey romance guide.
Sports romance, enemies-to-lovers
Rivalry is structurally native to sports romance — opposing teams, competing for the same spot, a coach’s daughter — so this combination produces more genuine antagonism than enemies-to-lovers does in most other subgenres, where the enemies part often evaporates by chapter four.
Fake dating, contemporary
The most reliable comfort trope there is: a pretence with a deadline, and two people who have to be convincing. Large enough that you will want a second filter — add grumpy-sunshine or a heat level depending on which version you want.
Marriage of convenience, historical
The trope in its native habitat. In a contemporary setting a marriage of convenience needs a contrivance to justify it; in a Regency or Victorian one it is simply how the world worked, so the stakes are real without any authorial scaffolding. Our historical romance guide covers the standouts.
Mafia, dark
The step past Twisted Love. Arranged marriages between families, possessive leads, and content warnings that are not decorative. Filtering on Dark rather than searching "mafia" is the important part — it excludes the lighter mob-adjacent contemporary that shares the keyword.
Fated mates, paranormal
The defining paranormal trope: the bond is not chosen, which removes the will-they-won’t-they and replaces it with what-does-it-cost. Deep enough to be its own reading project, and heavily weighted toward long series. Our paranormal guide has the entry points.
Romantasy, enemies-to-lovers
The ACOTAR and Fourth Wing shape: a fantasy world, and a love interest introduced as a threat. A small, high-quality set — and if it is too small, swap Romantasy for Fantasy, which is where a lot of pre-2023 romantasy is catalogued. See books like ACOTAR.
What the heat levels actually mean
This is the filter people get wrong most often, because blurbs are unreliable and "spicy" means different things to different readers. The catalogue uses five levels: clean (690 books, no on-page intimacy), sweet (1,858, romantic but restrained), steamy (1,634, on-page but not the focus), spicy (1,524, frequent and explicit), and dark (501, explicit with content that needs warnings).
If you have ever bought a book on a BookTok recommendation and found it far more or far less explicit than you expected, this is the filter that fixes it — and it is more honest than the marketing copy, because it is applied by the same standard across all twelve thousand books.
A note on the long tail
There are nearly two thousand distinct trope tags in the catalogue, which means the specific thing you want almost certainly exists as a filter. touch-her-and-die, secret-baby, morally-grey, marriage-of-convenience, insta-love — all real, all filterable. The browse page lists them with counts, so you can see what is worth combining before you commit.
If you are not sure what a trope is called, our tropes explained guide names them, and romance subgenres explained covers the categories. Between the two you should be able to describe what you want precisely enough to filter for it — which is the whole trick.