A Fire, a Feud, and a Wedding Nobody Wanted

Aida Gallo crashes a party at the Griffin mansion, wanders into the library, and accidentally sets it on fire.

That is the entire inciting incident, and Sophie Lark commits to the absurdity of it rather than dressing it up. The Gallos are Chicago's Italian mafia. The Griffins are the Irish. The two families have hated each other for generations, and one nineteen year old's bad night nearly restarts a war neither side can afford.

The fathers' solution is a marriage. Aida to Callum Griffin, heir to the Irish side, aspiring alderman, thirty years old to her nineteen, and furious about the arrangement in a very different register than she is.

What It's About

Callum is cold, controlled, and openly contemptuous of the bride he has been handed. Aida responds to being underestimated by escalating: she sabotages his tuxedo, then poisons him with strawberries at their own wedding, knowing he is allergic. He spends the reception in a hospital bed. It is not a meet-cute. It is closer to a duel.

What follows is the standard arranged-marriage shape: proximity forcing familiarity, familiarity curdling into attraction, both of them pretending the attraction is not happening for roughly two hundred pages. Lark writes the antagonism with real energy in the opening act, and the mafia backdrop, gunfire and political manoeuvring included, gives the will-they tension somewhere to live besides the bedroom.

This is a standalone with a complete ending. No cliffhanger. The series continues with different couples in the same Chicago underworld, and you do not need this book to understand the ones that follow.

What Works

The setup is efficient. Lark does not waste time establishing the Griffin-Gallo hatred. A handful of scenes and the reader understands exactly what these two families are willing to do to each other, which makes the arranged marriage land as a real cost rather than a plot device.

Aida has a voice. Brash, funny, and genuinely unwilling to perform the docile bride she has been assigned to be. Her early chapters, particularly the wedding sabotage, are the best comic material in the book.

It is short and it moves. Under three hundred pages, and the pacing rarely drags. If you want a mafia romance you can finish in an evening, this delivers on the promise.

Where It Struggles

The chemistry does not match the hatred. This is the most consistent criticism of the book, and it holds up. The opening establishes real animosity between Aida and Callum, and the turn toward attraction happens faster than the antagonism earns. Readers who want a slow burn proportional to the setup will find this one rushes it.

Callum is a harder sell than the genre usually allows. He is condescending toward Aida for a significant stretch of the book, and not clearly framed as a flaw he will grow out of. Some readers find this an authentic alpha-hero register. Others find him simply unpleasant to spend the book with, particularly given the nineteen and thirty year age gap the text does not dwell on.

The conflict resolves too easily. A third-act misunderstanding, the kind built for a prolonged breakup, gets resolved within a chapter. After the setup invests in Callum's jealousy, the anticlimax undercuts what should have been the book's most dramatic stretch.

And it reads like a first entry, because it is one. The Gallo brothers, Aida's family dynamic, and the wider Chicago underworld are sketched rather than developed. This is table-setting for five more books, and it shows.

The Velvet Coven Verdict

Brutal Prince is a competent opening chapter to a series that, by every account including its own author's fans, gets considerably better once it stops introducing itself.

Read it for Aida, for the efficient mafia setup, and for an evening's worth of enemies-to-lovers with real stakes attached. Do not expect the chemistry to match the hatred, and do not expect Callum to win you over immediately. This is the weakest entry by most readers' accounts, and it is also the only door into a series over five hundred thousand ratings deep.

Three and a half out of five. The series is worth continuing. This book is worth reading as the price of admission rather than the destination.

Content note: Mafia violence, an age gap the text does not interrogate, possessive and controlling behaviour framed as romantic, explicit sexual content.

Quick Reference

  • Author: Sophie Lark
  • Published: July 2020, self-published
  • Series: Brutal Birthright, Book 1 of 6. Standalone with a complete ending.
  • Pages: under 300
  • Setting: Chicago, Irish and Italian mafia families
  • Tropes: Enemies to lovers, arranged marriage, mafia, age gap, forced proximity
  • Spice level: 4/5, explicit
  • Status: On Kindle Unlimited. Over 500,000 ratings across the series.