Underworld

About the Underworld series

Underworld is Sophie Lark's first mafia-romance series, eight standalone dark romances built around thieves, hitmen, detectives, and Bratva bosses moving through the same criminal underworld. Ivan opens the run with an assassin sent to take down a Bratva boss instead falling under his control; later entries follow an underground fighter and the woman trapped by a debt to his organization (Snow), a Paris mob boss confronting a former classmate's revenge plot (Roman), a nightclub singer and the enforcer ordered to deliver her to the Bratva (Dom), and further Bratva-world pairings through Anton, Nikolai, Luca, and Black. Each book is written to stand alone -- new couple, new case, no cliffhangers -- but characters and organizations recur across the run for readers who go through it in order, and several of its families and conflicts carry forward into Lark's later Kingmakers series.

The series was originally published across 2019 and 2020 under the title Colors of Crime, with each book carrying a color in its title (Emerald, Violet, Crimson, Sapphire, and so on) rather than a character's name; it was later retitled and renumbered as Underworld, with the books renamed after their heroes and resequenced into the reading order used today. Readers who want Lark's rougher, more heist-and-hitman register before her boarding-school-set Kingmakers world should start here.

How to read this series

Current official reading order: Ivan, Snow, Roman, Dom, Anton, Nikolai, Luca, Black. Each book is a complete standalone romance with its own couple, so you can pick up any single title without confusion -- but reading in this order surfaces the hidden connections between books that the author has said reward series readers. Note that this reading-order numbering does not match original publication order: the series was first released under the title Colors of Crime, and the first four books in today's Underworld numbering (Ivan, Snow, Roman, Dom) were actually published in 2020, after the last four (Anton, Nikolai, Luca, Black), which came out in 2019 under different color-coded titles.