In His Keeping
by Maya Banks · HarperCollins · 2015
A romantic-suspense engine that fuses bodyguard-protector intimacy with a danger-in-jeopardy plot, deferring its first consummation past the midpoint so attachment accrues through proximity and rescue before release. Threat escalation and the heroine's telekinetic vulnerability do most of the tension work, with steam arriving as earned payoff rather than constant beat.
Engineered signals
Six estimated signals for how hard this title works the immersion engine, each scored on the same 0–100 scale so books compare directly. Directional, not exact — see the methodology below.
What this book is tagged
The full tag set, grouped by dimension. Heat & Kink and Content Warnings are the explicit signals — surfaced, not buried in a flat trope list.
Genre & Setting
Structure & POV
Relationship Tropes
Hero Archetypes
Heroine Archetypes
Heat & Kink
Content Warnings
Pairing & Orientation
Location
Estimated. These charts visualize the engineered signals — arc shape, trope weights, and the 0–100 profile are analytical estimates from automated text sampling, directional rather than exact.
Share of page-time spent on buildup and tension rather than payoff. High values mean the book sells the wait, not the moment.
How strongly the narration collapses the gap between reader and protagonist, peaking with first-person, reader-insert voice.
The "book boyfriend" pull: how hard the text works to form a one-sided attachment to a love interest.
Cliffhanger and serial-loop intensity — the compulsion to start the next chapter or installment.
How steeply intensity ramps across the arc. A steep slope is the tolerance signal: each payoff has to outdo the last.
Query the text itself
Beyond the scores: select a pre-determined query to read real keyword-in-context excerpts from the book’s text, located across its arc. Counts are first-pass lexical-pattern matches across the full text, refined as the analysis matures.
Excerpts are short keyword-in-context fragments from In His Keeping by Maya Banks (2015), quoted for research and commentary under fair use — a bounded window around each match, not continuous text.
Acts
Anatomy
Dynamics & Kink
Buildup
Emotional
Mentions of Backside
90 matches · showing 6
| Ch. | Page | Matched fragment |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | 7 | … them. My body rejects them.” Her eyes closed as she said the last, and tears leaked silently down her cheeks. “I couldn’t bear it if you ever grew to resent me for that,” she continued in a … |
| 5 | 43 | … single unguarded moment. She was exposed and vulnerable. Her life would be forever changed because of one self-entitled asshole who thought his parents’ money and status would allow him to coast through life unscathed. She scrambled out … |
| 6 | 48 | … brush with death. Instead she looked even more terrified than she had when confronted with the arrogant little assholes. There was something about the entire thing that bothered him, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. … |
| 7 | 57 | … been able to protect him and for that matter her father was very capable of kicking some serious ass. Unless . . . Perhaps they’d drugged her parents like they intended to drug her. There were a … |
| 9 | 85 | … balance one another out.” He shot her a look, his eyebrows rising, and she immediately blushed, heat burning her cheeks as she realized how what she’d said sounded. “I didn’t mean it like that,” she said hastily, … |
| 10 | 89 | … her rope’s end and was on the verge of collapsing and she didn’t need him being a surly asshole to her. But it angered him to think of such a vulnerable, innocent woman in the clutches of … |
Where the content lands
Not just how much, but where. Each content category is mapped across the chapter arc — buildup spread thin, explicit acts concentrated at the payoff chapters.
Acts
Anatomy
Dynamics & Kink
Buildup
Emotional
How explicit is this, really?
A single title means little in isolation. Set against the indexed catalog, the scale of this book's explicit content becomes legible.
More explicit than 11% of the indexed catalog · #154 of 180 · 0.8 scenes / 100 pp
How these metrics are derived
The book is a real published work; the signals below are produced by sampling its text and scoring each on a common 0–100 scale, so titles can be compared on the same axes.
Estimated. Every signal on this page is an analytical estimate from automated text sampling — directional, not an exact measurement — and the arc curves are illustrative shapes, not chapter-by-chapter readings.
- Anticipation Ratio
- Share of page-time spent on buildup and tension rather than payoff. High values mean the book sells the wait, not the moment.
- Explicit Density
- Explicit scenes per 100 pages — how concentrated the payoff is across the length of the book.
- POV Immersion
- How strongly the narration collapses the gap between reader and protagonist, peaking with first-person, reader-insert voice.
- Parasocial Index
- The "book boyfriend" pull: how hard the text works to form a one-sided attachment to a love interest.
- Serialization
- Cliffhanger and serial-loop intensity — the compulsion to start the next chapter or installment.
- Escalation Slope
- How steeply intensity ramps across the arc. A steep slope is the tolerance signal: each payoff has to outdo the last.