Below is the complete list of Chicago Ruthless books in reading order, presented in publication order for the series by Sadie Kincaid. This is the recommended reading sequence for the series.
Chicago Ruthless Series
- Dante (2023)
- Joey (2023)
- Lorenzo (2023)
- Keres (2024)
- Chicago Ruthless- Painful (2026)
(With Michelle Landau)
About Chicago Ruthless Series
Sadie Kincaid’s Chicago Ruthless is a dark mafia romance series built around the Moretti crime family, and that family focus is the key to understanding how the books work. This is not a single-couple duet stretched across several volumes, nor is it a loose shared-world label where every book can be treated as fully detached. It is a four-book series, with each novel centered on a different Moretti sibling while still belonging to one connected family world. That structure makes reading order important even though each book has its own romantic arc, because the broader family dynamics, loyalties, and power structure give the series its continuity.
The sequence begins with Dante and continues through Joey, Lorenzo, and Keres. The titles themselves signal one of the series’ main attractions: each book is built around a particular central figure, but the appeal lies in the cumulative portrait of the Morettis as a whole. That kind of setup is common in mafia romance at its strongest. Readers get the satisfaction of a focused central couple in each installment, while the family network keeps the emotional and social world feeling larger than any one relationship. Read in order, the series preserves that widening sense of connection. Characters introduced in one book do not simply disappear into the background; they remain part of the world that later books inherit.
Tonally, Chicago Ruthless sits firmly in the darker, higher-heat end of contemporary romance. The available book listings describe entries such as Dante as dark mafia romance with enemies-to-lovers and forced-proximity elements, while later books continue the same general mood within different relationship setups. That tells you a lot about the series before even opening the first novel. These books are not aiming for restrained realism or understated emotional drama. They are built around danger, possession, criminal hierarchy, family power, and romantic intensity sharpened by threat. The world matters because it gives the relationships pressure. Love in this kind of series is never separate from control, loyalty, and risk.
What makes publication order the best route is not confusion over chronology so much as the way family-based romance series accumulate emotional meaning. Even if each book can technically stand on its own, the full effect comes from watching the Moretti family world unfold one sibling at a time. The first book establishes the tone and the power structure; the later books deepen that atmosphere by showing different angles on the same empire. Reading out of order would still leave the main romance understandable, but it would weaken the sense of escalation and reduce the satisfaction of seeing the family’s internal world gradually revealed.
Within Sadie Kincaid’s larger bibliography, Chicago Ruthless fits neatly into the side of her work most associated with dangerous contemporary power worlds rather than paranormal fantasy. Her official site groups it alongside other “Ruthless” lines such as LA Ruthless, New York Ruthless, and Manhattan Ruthless, which suggests a broader brand logic built around city-based dark romance series with strong identity and clear tonal promises. Chicago Ruthless stands as one branch of that larger mode, but its Moretti-centered structure gives it a particularly cohesive feel.
Taken as a whole, Chicago Ruthless is best understood as a connected four-book mafia romance series in which each installment spotlights a different member of the same crime family. That makes the reading order straightforward, but still meaningful. The books are not one long single-couple arc, yet they are clearly designed to be experienced as parts of one family saga, with publication order preserving the intended buildup of loyalty, danger, and emotional payoff.