Brutal Birthright

About the Brutal Birthright series

Brutal Birthright is Sophie Lark's mafia-romance series about the Griffin and Gallo families, Irish and Italian crime dynasties who have fought for control of Chicago's underworld for generations. Each of the six books follows a different sibling from one family into a dangerous, forbidden entanglement with someone from the other side -- or, by the later books, with a third power entering the city's underworld. It opens with Brutal Prince, in which Gallo daughter Aida accidentally starts a fire at a Griffin family party, and the fallout forces her into an arranged marriage with Callum Griffin, the cold, ambitious Griffin heir, to prevent all-out war between the families. Stolen Heir turns to Callum's gentler sister Nessa, and Broken Vow to their iron-willed sister Riona, while Heavy Crown brings in Yelena Yenina, daughter of Chicago's most vicious Bratva boss, expanding the war into a three-family conflict.

Published in 2020 and 2021, the series is dark, high-heat mafia romance built on enemies-to-lovers and arranged-marriage tropes, with a genuinely serialized underworld plot -- the Griffin-Gallo war, and later the Bratva's arrival -- running underneath each couple's individual story and paying off by the final book. Brutal Birthright is also the direct parent generation to Lark's Kingmakers series: several Kingmakers Academy students are the children of Brutal Birthright's leads, though Kingmakers is written to be read on its own. Readers who want Lark's mafia-romance voice at its most classic -- family war, forced proximity, morally gray heirs -- should start here, before or after Kingmakers.

How to read this series

Publication order, starting with Brutal Prince. Each book follows a different Griffin or Gallo sibling (and, from Heavy Crown, a rival Bratva family) into their own romance, but the overarching Griffin-Gallo war builds across all six books and earlier couples continue to appear, so publication order is strongly recommended over reading any single book in isolation. Readers who've already read Kingmakers will recognize several parents of that series' students among this series' leads; Brutal Birthright can be read before or after Kingmakers, as neither requires the other.