‘ll be honest, when an author’s bio says “mafia thriller series,” I usually brace myself for a certain kind of book. Slicked-back hair, romanticized violence, a body count standing in for a plot. CJ Simone, author of suspense and dark psychological fiction and the mind behind the Children of the Mob series, isn’t writing that book, and the more I dug into her, the clearer it became that her real subject was never the mob at all. It’s the kids who grew up inside it, and what surviving that does to a person’s mind. Worth noting too, the mafia series is only one piece of what she does. Her catalog also includes The Gallos, a standalone psychological thriller about a girl invited into her wealthy neighbors’ home only to be framed for their abusive father’s murder, Pip and Estella, a gothic historical retelling of Dickens’s Great Expectations told in dual points of view, following two orphans, one raised humble and one raised wealthy but lonely, whose bond gets used as a weapon in someone else’s vengeful plan, and an upcoming gothic thriller, all of it united under what she calls dark psychological fiction meant to offer both thrills and something to actually sit with. That’s the spotlight I want to run today, not a review of one book, but a look at why this particular author keeps circling back to the same dark, family-shaped well.
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