Nero
S.J. Tilly's contemporary mafia romance is part of her interconnected Tracker Mafia series and centers on Nero, a Chicago underboss with a violent reputation, and the woman he becomes obsessed with after a single chance encounter. Tilly writes in alternating first person, dropping the reader into Nero's possessive, almost surgical inner monologue and into the heroine's smarter, warier counterpoint as he reorders his life around her. The book leans hard into the morally gray love-interest and breath-play tropes that have made Tilly a fixture on contemporary romance and BookTok shelves. Expect explicit on-page intimacy, a hero whose day job involves serious crime, and the high-stakes, high-spice rhythm that the Tracker Mafia universe trades on. Readers who came to Tilly through Mickey or Lorenzo will find Nero a darker entry, and new readers can pick it up without having read the earlier books in the series.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Nero
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
On the run with her young son after stealing from very bad men, Vivian crosses paths with Nero, an Italian outfit boss in the Twin Cities. He decides she belongs with him. He has the resources to make sure of it.
Yes. Nero is an explicit dark romance with multiple on-page sex scenes, around 4 to 5 out of 5 on the spice scale. It is part of S.J. Tilly's Mafia Made interconnected dark romance series.
Yes. Nero is an explicit dark romance with multiple on-page sex scenes, around 4 to 5 out of 5 on the spice scale. It is part of S.J. Tilly's Mafia Made interconnected dark romance series.
Nero is part of S.J. Tilly's connected Mafia Made universe. The books feature different couples in the same crime family world. Each can be read on its own, though side characters cross over.
Nero was written by S.J. Tilly.
Nero is a standalone novel by S.J. Tilly, not part of a series.
Nero is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.