Book Review: Beautiful Things Obey By T.L. Smith, Penny Dee & Kia Carrington-Russell

Beautiful Things Obey By T.L. Smith, Penny Dee & Kia Carrington-Russell


Beautiful Things Obey by T.L. Smith, Penny Dee & Kia Carrington-Russell - Book 1 in the Beautiful Things Series

Tropes: Dark Mafia Romance, Enemies to Lovers, Obsessed MMC, He Falls First, Hidden Identity, Stalking, Touch Her and You Die, Morally Grey MMC, Sassy FMC, Co-Written Series

Summary:

Beautiful Things Obey opens the Beautiful Things series, and it arrives with an unusual pedigree: three authors sharing one book. T.L. Smith, Penny Dee and Kia Carrington-Russell have written something that reads as a single voice rather than a collaboration, and what they have built is a dark mafia romance with two equally dangerous people at the centre of it.

Dr Leonore Graves works nights in a morgue, and the work she does off the books is the reason half the criminal element in this city sleeps easy. A wound closed up so neatly it never happened. A file that quietly stops existing. A body that gives nothing away. She has a quiet arrangement with almost every crew in town, and one hard rule about the crew she will not touch.

That rule holds right up until Silas Vescari walks into her morgue. He runs the organisation that other criminals step carefully around, and he has never needed to raise his voice to be understood. He watches her work, decides she belongs to him, and informs her of it as though the matter was settled before he arrived. Leonore tells him no. She keeps telling him no. He keeps coming back.

What follows is a slow, dangerous circling between two people who both know exactly how this world operates, made considerably worse by the fact that Leonore has spent a long time keeping her own history buried. Obsessive, violent and sharper than most series openers, with a hero who falls first and a heroine with no intention of catching him.

 

BOOK REVIEW

Mafia romance is my comfort read. It's the shelf I go to when nothing else is landing, which means I have worked through an unreasonable amount of it. So take it seriously when I tell you Beautiful Things Obey stands out. Three authors, and I could not find a seam anywhere. It reads like one person wrote it.

Let's start with Leonore, because she is the reason this book works. A mortician who quietly tidies up after every crew in the city, and who does all of it with an absolute mouth on her. Sassy FMC is my weakness and she is exactly my flavour: sharp, deeply unimpressed, and so used to handling things alone that asking for help doesn't seem to occur to her. The most feared man in the city turns up in her morgue to explain how things are going to go from now on, and she simply says no. Then says it again. I was gone from that moment.

And Silas. God. He isn't loud, and that is exactly what makes him. No shouting, no threats, no theatrics. He just turns up again. And again. Perfectly composed, entirely certain of how this ends, and more captivated every single time she shuts the door on him. He falls first and he falls humiliatingly hard, and watching a man with that much power quietly rearrange his life around the one woman who won't give him anything is the best dynamic I've read in this genre in ages. Every scene they share crackles. The banter alone is worth the read.

And it isn't just the two of them circling each other for four hundred pages, which is what really lifted it for me. The plot is genuinely interesting, and I don't get to say that about mafia romance as often as I'd like. Leonore has been living behind a carefully maintained version of herself, and when that starts coming apart the fallout arrives from a direction I hadn't been watching. Suddenly the people she cares about are standing in the blast radius of a war she never chose. It's bleak, it's mean, and it never once sits still.

Which brings me to the fact that I tore through this. Every chapter ends in a way that makes putting it down feel like a personal failing, and somewhere in the back half I stopped pretending I was going to sleep at a reasonable hour. And then the ending. Explosive. Everything these three have been quietly stacking up goes off in the final stretch, and I sat there afterwards staring at the wall for a good while.

Spice-wise it lands at about a three for me. The heat is there and it's very good, but this is a book that leads with tension rather than filling pages, and it is better for it. The wanting does more work here than any scene could.

If you love mafia romance, an obsessive MMC who would happily set the city on fire, a heroine who refuses to make herself smaller for anyone, and a plot that actually earns its turns, read this one. It's a complete story with no cliffhanger, and it sets up a world I am fully prepared to live in for the rest of the series.

“Beautiful things like her should obey.”

If you want dark mafia romance with a heroine every bit as unflinching as the man trying to own her, Beautiful Things Obey is the place to start. Three authors, one seamless voice, and a world built to keep you coming back. Obsessive, violent, and exactly the kind of series opener that ruins your weekend in the best way.