TRUST ME

In Bell’s novel, a mob wife stirs passions in a vicious enforcer.

As Bell’s romance opens, a temporary truce has been called for the first time in a decade between the rival Irish gang families, the Brennans and the Flynns—the occasion is a wedding. Twenty-year-old Willa Brennan, newly- widowed wife of Tiernan Brennan, is now going to marry Raphael Flynn in a move that will consolidate the business of the families and represent a financial windfall. “Our stronghold in the Northeast was an international trade route away from surpassing what any Irish-American crime syndicate had ever accomplished,” reflects Raphael’s brother and pitiless enforcer, Lucifer. “And the Brennans would benefit from the dependable shipments our stateside channels and connections with the Mejia Cartel could provide.” Lucifer actually met Willa years earlier, but in the interval he’s become a vicious killer who recognizes the utility of the marriage. “Our adversaries were infinite,” he thinks. “For the Flynns to remain the most formidable and most feared crime family east of New York, we needed to sustain our savage tactics” (foremost among the Flynn’s enemies is the Russian mob). Willa is fully aware of the tense situation she’s accepting by marrying Raphael. The last thing she expects is the additional twist that she encounters: a fierce attraction to Lucifer. She’ll have to navigate not only the dangers of mob life but her growing attraction to the most violent man in Boston.

Bell does a very adept job of writing in the standard contemporary urban romance register of steamy encounters and hurricanes of F-bombs. Some of her characters joke in tired stereotypes (“The identity of Widow Brennan was as elusive as a sober Irishman”), and although she’s skillful at dramatic lines (“Time and cataclysm eventually made us enemies”), this facility can sometimes curdle into bathos (“I swallowed the ball of panic in my throat before I choked on it”). The narrative is gritty, with betrayals and violence, and Bell effectively balances these elements with the growing relationship between Willa and Lucifer, which tends to evoke prose that’s both overwrought and enjoyable. “Lucifer drew me into his chest and released a sigh filled with messages it would take me a lifetime to translate,” Willa thinks at one such point. “We didn’t have that kind of time together, but at least we had this one night.” The novel’s most sharply handled plot twist leaves Willa on death’s door and highlights the heightened vulnerability readers have watched grow in Lucifer. When a helpless Willa overhears Lucifer desperately bargaining with God for her life, readers will feel like they’ve made a long and worthwhile journey to reach such a point. Those same readers will, of course, need to quiet their objections to the book’s moral relativism: The crime “thrones” and “kingdoms” seen throughout the narrative are built on extortion, drug running, and murder (as in most urban romances, these things are more of a backdrop than a moral quandary). But the temporary compromise is worth it—Bell provides a passionate story of unexpected love in exchange.

A page-turning and emotionally satisfying unlikely love story set in the world of the Boston mob.