J. J. McAvoy

To the outside world, they look like American royalty, giving to charities, feeding the homeless, and rebuilding the city. But behind closed doors is a constant battle for dominance between two bosses, cultures, and hearts.


Ruthless People is a romantic crime fiction set in modern day Chicago and follows the life and marriage of Melody Giovanni and Liam Callahan - rivals by blood and leaders through fear. Theirs is an arranged marriage with the goal of ending years of bloodshed between the Irish and the Italians. Liam assumes he's getting a simple-minded wife, one he can control, one who bends to his every need...he’ll soon find out that his wife to be does not fit that mold.


Melody knows exactly what type of man Liam is and would rather die than give up the power she has spent her life earning.


The mafia of the past has evolved, and with rival bosses gunning for their family, Melody and Liam will have to learn to work as one to take down those who stand in their way.

Ruthless People

Nouran Hazem

3.5 ⭐️
The writing wasn’t great (made me cringe a lot and they were always yelling?😭💀) and I really disliked a lot of the language used (calling women whores or calling Adriana ugly or the whole speech about blaming the drug addicts) but I did love Liam and Melody’s relationship, she was such a badass (although irritating at times when she’d insult other women) and stole the show and I love how Liam went from being a chauvinist to downright worshipping her.. They were such a powerful duo! And I’m probably gonna be reading the rest of the series later for the family dynamic and how they’re literally so terrified of Mel? Yeah love it when women are so badass everyone is terrified of them.

Nouran

Anna Ureta

I’m so happy! Because I finally read the first book of this series!
 (On a side note, wow this is extremely difficult to type because I was just diagnosed with cataracts a couple of days ago so seeing is really difficult, so I will probably make a ton of mistakes).
 Anyway, Ruthless People came HIGHLY RECOMMENDED to me by a good friend and frequent guest reviewer on my blog, Aimi. It was funny because the author of the series, J. J. McAvoy and I are similar in age and she’s somewhat local (give or take a few hours).
 What drew me to this series is that it is mafia themed which I don’t see very often considering my genre of reading.
 The only words I could possibly use to describe this book and series are RAW, PASSIONATE, and POWERFUL.
 So if you’re into powerful people and powerful families doing whatever possible to take down their enemies, then this is definitely the series for you!
 
The Callahans and the Giovanni’s and two of the most powerful mafia families in the world, and after fighting for years they’ve finally settled on an agreement that will make both families happy.
 There’s only one way Liam Callahan is going to become head of his family, and that’s to marry the infamous and mysterious, Melody Nicci Giovanni. He knows absolutely nothing about the girl and has no idea what she looks like. However the minute he sets eyes on her and realizes what she’s capable of, he knows he’s met his match.
 Rather than trying to be the head of her family, Melody has been running her family for years. Everyone and everything is below her, even her fiancee, Liam, whom she refuses to submit to. With this marriage she realizes she can become more powerful than she ever imagined and with it, also learn about the importance of real family and real love.
 
I won’t lie. When I first picked up this book I’ll admit that I wasn’t in love with it right away.
 It took me several POV switches before I really got to grips with Liam and Melody and what these two were like. It was different reading a book about murder and torture when all you’re used to reading is romance. Readers really have to get into the killer mindset in reading this book and must realize that these are RUTHLESS PEOPLE, who will sooner kill than be killed and will do anything to protect what’s theirs. In a way you have to admire them and their…ruthlessness. Oh, I probably should have mentioned this earlier but, WARNING – THIS BOOK CONTAINS MATURE CONTENT AND EXPLICIT SCENES. NOT RECOMMENDED FOR YOUNG READERS. Just in case that wasn’t clear when I mentioned it was mafia themed.
 
At first the switching of POVs messed with me a little, especially when the POVs weren’t very long. There was a lot of POV switching within each chapter and it’s told in the first person. At first I struggled sometimes to remember, ‘Who’s POV was this?’ every time I read a new section. After a while, it got easy and the book became more enjoyable when you actually looked forward to reading a certain character’s POV.
 
“She looks like a sweet little lamb from afar, but when you get close, you find out she skinned and ate the damn thing just to use it as a coat. She’s a beast.”
 
I LOVED Liam and Melody the most out of everyone in their family. I think I was partial to their violence and their not taking ish from nobody because they were in charge. It’s going to be really difficult to find a passage I can quote because everything that comes out of their mouth is quite…vulgar. But here are two people, albeit stubborn, who know what they want and know exactly how to get it. They will be violent, cunning, sly, and are not afraid of torture if absolutely necessary. Another thing I love about these two is their love/hate relationship towards each other. There’s nothing sexier than two people who love to hate each other, at least I think so. They almost want to kill each other as much as they want to kill their enemies, except eventually these two finally realize that they need each other in order to get what they want. Melody becomes Liam’s everything and Liam becomes the thing she didn’t know she needed.
 
“She is. . . she is Bloody Melody and perfect. God created her and then shattered the mold afterward, for the world could not handle two of her.”
 
Sometimes you need a little violence in your life, or reading life, and Ruthless People is definitely a book I recommend to read in between all of your pretty little romances. It’s HOT, SEXY, RAW, and not to mention BLOODY.
 If you want female leads, sexy alpha males, along with guns and explosions, then you definitely need to pick this book up now!
 It’s a wonderful debut to an author I will be following closely! #supportlocalauthors!
 
4.5/5 Hearts of Love

Vera Rich-Byberg

J.J. McAvoy

Ruthless People #1...the book that started it all...... "One Marriage + Two Bosses = 3X the Chaos." To the outside world, they look like American royalty, giving to charities, feeding the homeless, and rebuilding the city. But behind closed doors is a constant battle for dominance between two bosses, cultures, and hearts. Ruthless People is a romantic crime fiction set in modern day Chicago and follows the life and marriage of Melody Giovanni and Liam Callahan - rivals by blood and leaders through fear. Theirs is an arranged marriage with the goal of ending years of bloodshed between the Irish and the Italians. Liam assumes he's getting a simple-minded wife, one he can control, one who bends to his every need...he’ll soon find out that his wife to be does not fit that mold. Melody knows exactly what type of man Liam is and would rather die than give up the power she has spent her life earning. The mafia of the past has evolved, and with rival bosses gunning for their family, Melody and Liam will have to learn to work as one to take down those who stand in their way. Check out more thrilling titles in the Ruthless People series: RUTHLESS PEOPLE #1 "One Marriage + Two Bosses = 3X the Chaos." THE UNTOUCHABLES (#2) "One Secret, Multiple Casualties." AMERICAN SAVAGES (#3) "Villains by Choice." A BLOODY KINGDOM (#4) “After the battle, sharpen your knives.” DECLAN + CORALINE(prequel novella that takes place 2 years before Ruthless People) "You don't find love; it finds you." And look for the Ruthless People spinoff, Children of Vice--out 5.17.17“From the Ruthless, Vice shall Rise.”

Annabella

3.5.
Butchered Italian nonwhitstanding, this rollercoaster of drama was fun. Well all need some, from to time, right?

Raluca

MEL TE AMO DEJA A LIAM Y CASATE CONMIGO
O podríamos ser un trío poderoso😈




Primera historia donde la chica no es la típica princesa de mafia, Mel es la jefa la big boss de todos.

jupiter

Rereading my fav mafia series in 2020 because the last book is coming out next week.

Hannah Gallacher

Karlita

Please it has a pregnancy trope😭, why did nobody warn me

celeste

There are so many things I need to say about this book, phew. First of all, there were so many times when I thought about DNFing this one, but I stuck with it because I kinda wanted to know what was gonna happen in the end and because I honestly am awful at DNFing books. The ending had a plot twist that I didn't see coming and that's mainly the reason why this book even got a two star rating.

I wanna mention all the things in Ruthless People that I had problems with:

As many have mentioned in their reviews, the first one is the lack of research. If you are going to write a book about a topic you are not very well-versed in, then do your fucking research for the love of god! It's disrespectful to your potential readers to throw in a bunch of inaccurate information just because you don't know stuff or because you didn't even bother doing the research that was necessary. And I'm talking about the entire representation of the Italian mafia. It takes literally one second to google and look up stuff on the basics of how Italian mafia families work, the hierarchies they have, the names of their members, etc. So it's really disappointing to find out that the author couldn't even spend five minutes researching the MAIN topic this book was going to deal with. It takes minimum effort to learn that the leader's called Don and not BOSS, and also, the lack of a hierarchy which is basically what the Italian mafia is most known for, was completely absent here. No mention of a consigliere at all. I also think this book is extremely disrespectful to Italians. If you are going to introduce representation of whatever kind of people, again, DO YOUR RESEARCH! the fact that I don't even speak Italian, but since there are a lot of words and phrases that are similar to Spanish and even I could even realize the grammatical errors in the Italian phrases the author wrote in this book, was infuriating. BAD REP IS NOT REP AT ALL. It's disrespectful to the people you are portraying inaccurately, and I honestly don't understand what was the point of making an entire book about the Italian mafia if you are not even gonna bother looking up how certain things are said in Italian. smh. 

Now onto the characters. I honestly started loving Melody. She was ruthless, cunning, cold-blooded and sassy, but around the middle of the book I started getting real tired of her bullshit and double-standards. Whatever Liam did that she didn't like she threw it in his face all the time, and threatened to kill him if he ever did or said the same thing ever again. Meanwhile, whenever she did the exact same thing, she excused herself and thought that she was in the right to do so. The double-standards of her way of thinking was just annoying as fuck to me. I also couldn't stand her by the end of the book when she kept threatening to kill every one of her now family-in-law and even her husband. I get that you are supposed to be the don of the mafia, but honestly honey, repeating how you are better than anyone else, how you wanna kill everyone just because they dare to look in your direction made this book unbearable to read. Like, seriously, she's supposed to be a killing machine, untouchable, have the highest IQ in the entire history, know a thousand langauges, be a ninja, and everyone should be afraid of her? unrealistic. You repeating in every other page how you are the boss and how smart you are actually had the opposite effect, at least for me. Quoting the wise words of one of the best characters written out there, Tywin Lannister, "any man who must say I am the king, is no true king". Sorry Melody, no printer just fax. I don't think I have anything worthy to say about Liam, he was okay, and even more likable by the end than Melody, that's for sure, but again, I was really hoping to see what was so special about him and Melody for them to control literally the entirety of a state under their mafia reign. 

Another issue I had was how hard it was for me to suspend my disbelief. The book basically follows our main characters, each heads of their respective mafia families, and they are both in their twenties. Have there been instances where young people have led the mafia? I'm pretty sure there must have been some cases, but honestly, anything in this book just seemed completely unrealistic to me. And not only because they are hella young to be in charge of the mafia, but because a lot of the scenes in this book were just utterly ridiculous. From the fact that they were able to burn down the place where their rivals were getting married (really, how were you even able to get into the wedding with gasoline on you??? as if they wouldn't pat down EVERY SINGLE PART OF YOUR BODY), to the fact that they kept talking about their "mafia business" in front of literally anyone who happened to be in their vicinity. It's true that a lot of people that are involved in that kind of life always feel like they are above the law and that have the impunity to walk around without ever being held accountable, mainly because a lot of the ones who sould bring them to justice are often in league with them, but honestly, they kept yelling about them killing people and throwing threats anywhere they went and people kept listening to them. It's just not the way people like that would behave, no matter how much power you have over cops or judges.

Now, I was really interested in the beginning of the book. I thought I was gonna get an enemies to lovers type of trope, which you can kinda say it was a trope present here, but not quite. I just ended being very disappointed overall with the story of this book. There was a plot twist that I didn't see coming which was kinda the highlight of the ending of this book, and it left a spark of interest in me to keep going with this series, but as of now, I'm in no hurry to keep going with the rest of the books.

J. J. Mcavoy

Ruthless People #1...the book that started it all...... "One Marriage + Two Bosses = 3X the Chaos." To the outside world, they look like American royalty, giving to charities, feeding the homeless, and rebuilding the city. But behind closed doors is a constant battle for dominance between two bosses, cultures, and hearts. Ruthless People is a romantic crime fiction set in modern day Chicago and follows the life and marriage of Melody Giovanni and Liam Callahan - rivals by blood and leaders through fear. Theirs is an arranged marriage with the goal of ending years of bloodshed between the Irish and the Italians. Liam assumes he's getting a simple-minded wife, one he can control, one who bends to his every need...he'll soon find out that his wife to be does not fit that mold. Melody knows exactly what type of man Liam is and would rather die than give up the power she has spent her life earning. The mafia of the past has evolved, and with rival bosses gunning for their family, Melody and Liam will have to learn to work as one to take down those who stand in their way. Check out more thrilling titles in the Ruthless People series: RUTHLESS PEOPLE #1 "One Marriage + Two Bosses = 3X the Chaos." THE UNTOUCHABLES (#2) "One Secret, Multiple Casualties." AMERICAN SAVAGES (#3) "Villains by Choice." A BLOODY KINGDOM (#4) "After the battle, sharpen your knives." DECLAN + CORALINE(prequel novella that takes place 2 years before Ruthless People) "You don't find love; it finds you." And look for the Ruthless People spinoff, Children of Vice--out 5.17.17 "From the Ruthless, Vice shall Rise."

alaska🪐

2.5 stars
i don't care too much that the depiction of organized crime is anything but correct, i mean it‘s called fiction for a reason, and enjoyed the strong female lead and the enemies-to-lovers-trope aswell as their powerstruggles quite a lot.
but it bothered me soooo much how awkwardly a lot of the sentences were worded and how many grammar and spelling mistakes were in this book. i can honestly live with a few, nobody is perfect especially when it’s not the authors native language, but it went so overboard that it disturbed the entire reading flow and i‘m not even a native speaker myself, so i probably missed half of them.
also i feel like the book progressed in a really weird way, so many plot twists that came out of the blue without really making sense. it was still catchy and an okayish read, but simply confusing after a while.

Michelle Vasquez

Ready for more Mel & Liam!

“He saw the deepest and dirtiest parts of my soul and mind but didn’t care. In fact, he wanted to stay in the darkness with me. Just him, me, and the brandy.”

Rivals by blood. Born to loathe one another. It’s the Italian verses Irish Mob. Arranged Marriage is commonplace in this world, but the uncommon thing about this marriage of convenience, is underestimating Melody Giovanni. 

“Ruthless People,” by JJ McAvoy is book one in her four part series; a dark mafia romance, set in Chicago. It places Liam and Melody together, in a marriage of convenience, and while they are bringing their rule under one roof, they each fight for dominance in their world and in the bedroom. I loved the fight that Melody had in her, and it made for a compelling lead in this story. Liam gave as good as he got, and I think he finally began to understand that he met his match and the other piece of his soul in being brought together with Melody. There were moments of pure darkness and rage, paired with hot chemistry and even parts I found myself chuckling out loud because of the trials they put each other through. I am anxious to see how this continues in the rest of the series!

Lacey

This mafia romance was wild, violent, over the top, and I loved it! I will admit I liked Melody's character more than Liam, who came off as a whiny brat. Melody has a kill streak a mile wide and doesn't hesitate to be the brutal mafia boss that she is. There's so much hate/love in their marriage of convenience and I just couldn't put this book down. It does focus more on the mafia aspect that the romance, but I found that I didn't mind at all. I can't wait to read more of this series!

Farah Khaled 

What is happening to me lately? I haven't finished half of the books I read recently. Unfortunately, this book was one of them /:

I really tried to finish it but I just couldn't.
3 stars ☆☆☆/5

Ruthless People

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