Sinful Vow (Dark Mafia Sins, book 1) by Emily Bowie – Review by Wendy Wary

Sinful Vow by Emily Bowie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’ve recently gotten into mafia books, and this was a great addition to the collection. The book starts out with Luca as a young orphan who runs the streets with his friends, pickpocketing unsuspecting victims. After getting caught in the act by a couple of mafia bosses, one of them takes him in as a son.

As an adult, Luca encounters the teenage daughter of an enemy boss as he’s leaving the scene of a crime, and Aly’s pass on ratting him out to her father forges an unlikely alliance between the two, which grows over time with random encounters.

As Aly grows on the fringe of the mafia, not quite fully under her father’s protection since her mother was his mistress, and never taking money from him to avoid his rule, she’s able to build a successful business. But, when her mother falls ill, she turns to her father to help with her medical care and finds herself sucked into her father’s business.

Things take a turn for the worse when her brother, the heir of the business, is killed, and her father decides it’s time for Aly to step up and marry into another mafia family to forge a stronger alliance. Held captive by her father until the wedding, Luca shows up to rescue her, but neither are sure how much to trust the other.

Luca declares he’ll marry Aly, and she finds herself still trapped, but in a different setting. Things heat up between the two and their bond is tested when Aly’s father gives her poison to kill Luca. Faced with deciding between allegiance to her family or the man who’s somehow always shown up to protect her when there was no one else, Aly must decide her own fate.

A great slow-burn romance with lots of twists and turns!

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