The best romance books about falling for a mafia boss

I’ve never come across a book that mixes mafia romance’s sumptuous luxury and knife-edge danger as well as this one. It almost feels like a billionaire romance: the hard-working assistant ignored by her cold, arrogant boss, the lavish cars and apartments, the way money is life-or-death for the struggling heroine but an irrelevance for the hero.

But Ruslan, the hero, isn’t just a CEO: he’s a Russian Mafia boss, and that brutal danger runs through the book like a vein of silver. I loved the way the heroine, Emma—who’s wonderfully self-reliant and has a BIG heart—stood up to him. I adored Ruslan’s cold exterior and secret warm heart, but it was the way he bonded with Emma’s adopted family that melted me.

A good mafia romance is all about family, and that’s what this one delivers in spades: two dysfunctional, squabbling, but ultimately loving mafia families who collide head-on when two of their number are forced to marry.

I loved both of them, even though they were very different: the cool, even cold Irish Mafia Griffins and the chaotic, passionate Italian Mafia Gallos. This is a forced marriage romance with real crackling enemies-to-lovers heat between Callum and Aida, which is exactly how I like it.

And between an election race, the wedding, and enemies vying for power, the plot races along. What I love most about this book is how two mortal enemies change and grow and become a couple you can genuinely see working.

Dante is the mafia romance that most made me want to throw my arms around the heroine and give her a huge hug. Kat is such a strong character with a traumatic past that made me want to weep. At first, I was worried she’d entered a new circle of hell when she became Dante’s captive. But the escalating dance these two weave turns into something wonderful, and once they fight through their problems, they become an unstoppable couple I rooted for.

This book is raw and sometimes dark, with plenty of heat, and you should check the trigger warnings before reading. But if it falls within your boundaries, it’s a fantastic, all-consuming journey.

This is the mafia romance that upended all my beliefs about what the genre could be. I vividly remember opening this book for the very first time, reading the prologue and the first few pages, and saying out loud, “Oh!” And then settling into the chair because I’d realized I wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while.

Yes, there’s a great hero and heroine, yes, there’s heat, but what I love about this book is the mystery. I just had so many questions and they were the right sort of questions: I was intrigued, not bewildered. I just wanted to sink into the book until I’d devoured every page, which is exactly what I did.

Even though it’s not all that old, this is what I think of as the classic mafia romance and one that puts the romance front and center. It has all the classic elements: Cosa Nostra (Sicilian rather than Russian or Irish Mafia), a forced marriage, an innocent heroine, and a cold-hearted hero who melts for her.

I took to Tori immediately: she’s very relatable and I could imagine her as a friend. I loved the sweetness of the romance, especially when this is a genre that often leans towards the dark, and I just ate up Angelo’s big, bold statements of love. This is the book I often recommend as a first mafia romance, especially for romance readers who aren’t sure if they’ll like the genre.