Sophie Lark

Sophie Lark, originally from Canada, relocated to the American West Coast after a blind date with her now-husband and has spent the years since building a prolific catalog of intense mafia and dark romance. Kingmakers, her best-known series in this catalog, is set at a boarding school that trains the sons and daughters of the world's mafia families in negotiation, combat and seduction under one rule: no killing on campus. Each of its five books follows a different heir through one school year of forbidden pairings — friends-to-lovers, bully romance, arranged marriage, enemies-to-lovers — while earlier couples continue in the background, building toward a single graduating class's shared reckoning. Kingmakers is a direct sequel generation to Lark's earlier Brutal Birthright duology, whose leads are several Kingmakers students' parents, though the newer series is written to be read entirely on its own. The five books were originally self-published under different titles (The Heir, The Rebel, The Bully, The Spy and Savage) before being repackaged as Year One through Year Four and Graduation for wide release — both title sets refer to the same books in the same order. New readers should start with Year One and read straight through, since the series follows one continuous school year rather than resetting with each couple. Lark continues to write steadily across mafia romance, including her ongoing Brutal Birthright and Underworld series.