The Maddest Obsession

What's inside (8 sections)

1. A Made girl with a sharp tongue
2. The quiet man across the room
3. Teasing, chasing, refusing to blink
4. Work trouble and Russian pressure
5. When the mask slips
6. What I kept and what tired me
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I came to this one straight off the first Made book, mostly because I could not stop thinking about the family dinners. The Sweetest Oblivion had left me with a soft spot for that loud Chicago outfit circle, and I wanted to see who else was standing around the table. A friend told me the second couple was pricklier, funnier, and harder to like at first. She was right on all three counts, though I would add stubborn to that list for both of them.

The facts first, since I like knowing what I am holding. The Maddest Obsession came out in 2019 as an indie release through Independently Published, and it runs 331 pages in the edition I tracked. It is Made #2, set after Sweetest Oblivion in the same Chicago outfit world. You can read it on its own, and I think the main plot still lands, but the family moments hit harder if you already know the couple from book one. They show up around the edges here, married and settled, and their presence gives this story a lived in feel.

The short version is this. Gianna is a young Made woman, sharp mouthed and used to getting her way inside her protected circle. Christian Allister is a quiet man who moves between the straight world and the mob world with a secret he cannot afford to drop. She decides he is interesting. He decides she is trouble. They spend most of the book circling each other, trading insults and favors, while a threat tied to a rival Russian crew keeps pushing them into the same rooms. It is adult romance, so there are bedroom scenes, and I will keep those general here and fade them out the way I wish more summaries would.

What pulled me in was the tone. Where the first book felt sweet under the menace, this one feels spiky. Gianna does not blush and fold her hands. She talks back. She drinks too much at parties and says the thing everyone else was thinking. Christian answers her with this flat calm that somehow makes her angrier. I laughed more in the first hundred pages of this book than in all of the previous one, even when I knew I should probably be worried about both of them.

A Made girl with a sharp tongue

Gianna grew up inside the life the way Elena did, but it shaped her differently. Where Elena learned to sit still and be agreeable, Gianna learned to talk. She is the girl at the family gathering with wine in her hand and a comeback ready. People around her call her spoiled, and sometimes she acts spoiled, but I read it more as armor. When everyone has decided you are the wild one, you start playing the part because at least then you get to pick the lines.

Her home life looks comfortable from the outside. Money. Protection. A father with weight in the outfit. Cousins and uncles who would hurt anyone who touched her. That safety comes with rules, though, and Gianna chafes at every one of them. She is supposed to dress right, date right, smile at the right men, and save her opinions for the kitchen. She does about half of that. She shows up late. She flirts when she should not. She asks rude questions at dinners and enjoys watching the older men squirm.

I liked her quickly, which surprised me, because on paper she does a lot of things that usually annoy me in heroines. She judges people fast. She uses her looks and her name to slide out of trouble. She can be careless with other people's feelings when she is bored. But Lori gives her a quick eye for weakness that makes her fun to follow. Gianna notices when someone is faking. She notices when a man is watching her a beat too long. She notices when her friends are scared and covering it with laughter. She is not deep at the start, but she is awake.

Her friendship circle matters here. She has girlfriends from good families who trade gossip and warn each other about bad matches. Those scenes felt true to me, the way young women in a closed world keep each other posted. Who drank too much last night. Whose father is pushing a match. Which new man in town is safe to tease and which one is safe to avoid. Gianna is the boldest of the group, the one who will walk up to the dangerous stranger while the others hiss at her to sit down.

Under the jokes, she is lonely in a specific way. Men want her because she is pretty and connected. Women her age envy her or copy her. Older relatives treat her like a problem to marry off. Nobody asks what she wants to do with her days. That hollow spot is why Christian gets under her skin so fast. He does not flatter her the usual way. He looks at her like she is a puzzle he would rather not solve, and for a girl who is used to being stared at, being studied feels new.

One early party scene sets the whole book. Gianna is drinking, dancing, drawing eyes, playing the wild girl to perfection. Christian is there on business, standing off to the side, watching the room instead of her. She tries to rattle him with a blunt remark. He answers without looking up, flat and dry, and walks away. Most men in her world would have lingered or scolded her. He dismisses her. She cannot stand it. I knew right then this was going to be a long chase, and that she would be the one doing most of the chasing at first.

The quiet man across the room

Christian Allister is built to be hard to read, and for a long stretch he is. He dresses well. He speaks politely. He shows up in rooms full of Made men without quite belonging to them, and nobody seems sure who invited him. In private, his thoughts run careful and tired, like a man doing math no one else can see. I guessed early that he was carrying a badge of some kind or working for people outside the outfit, and the book lets you sit with that guess for a while before it confirms the shape of it.

I want to stay general about his exact job because the fun of the middle is watching Gianna poke at his cover without knowing what it is. Think of him as a man with ties to law enforcement who has worked his way inside the mob world and now has to live there day after day. He files things away. He listens more than he talks. He has a code about who deserves to go down and who is just stuck, and that code gets harder to hold as he gets closer to Gianna and her people.

What makes him different from the hero of book one is control. Nicolas was open menace, a man everyone feared on sight. Christian is quieter. He smiles at dinners. He helps an old aunt with her chair. He remembers names. Then you catch him in a hallway with his face blank, listening at a door, or pressing a man with soft questions until the man gives up something useful. The switch is fast and cold. Gianna sees flashes of it before anyone else does, and instead of scaring her off, it hooks her.

He has reasons for his distance. The work has cost him a normal life. He cannot keep friends close. He cannot tell the truth about where he goes at night. He has watched the outfit hurt people and he has had to stand by and let small harms pass so he can build a case for the big ones. That kind of compromise leaves marks. Lori does not give him a long sad speech about it, which I liked. You get it in small pieces. A sleepless night. A call he does not answer. A look he gives a family photo before he puts it away.

Around Gianna, his control slips in ways that annoyed me and charmed me by turns. He tells himself to stay away from her because she can blow everything he has built. Then he shows up where she is. He warns her off with harsh words. Then he steps in when some drunk gets pushy with her at a club. He is older in the ways that count, steadier, more used to danger, and he knows the gap between them in experience could hurt her. To his credit, he says so out loud more than once. To his discredit, he keeps coming back anyway.

My favorite early beats with him are silent ones. Him watching her from across a restaurant while she pretends not to notice. Him fixing a problem for her family without taking credit. Him standing in the back at a christening or a birthday, holding a drink he never sips, counting exits. He feels like a man visiting a warm house he knows he might one day have to help burn down. That sadness sits under his dry humor and gives him more weight than the strong silent act alone would carry.

Teasing, chasing, refusing to blink

The middle of the book is a long game of provocation, and it is the best part. Gianna decides Christian is her project. She corners him at parties. She asks him point blank what he does for money and laughs when he gives a smooth non answer. She shows up in dresses cut to make him look, then mocks him for looking. She is shameless about it in a way that made me grin, because girls in her world are supposed to wait to be chosen and she does the choosing instead.

Christian handles it badly at first, which is fun to watch. He tries frost. He tries boredom. He tries leaving the room. Nothing works because Gianna reads his exits as proof she got to him. She follows him onto balconies and into hallways. She steals his lighter just to have a reason to stand close. She asks him about his past with this bright fake innocence that tells him she knows he is lying. He answers with short dry lines that only make her press harder.

Their banter carries whole chapters. She calls him boring. He calls her reckless. She tells him he needs to loosen up. He tells her she needs to learn when to stop talking. Under the jokes there is real heat, the kind built from attention rather than touch. He notices how she goes quiet when her father corrects her in public. She notices how his hands tighten when someone mentions the feds or an informant. They are both watchers, and being watched by an equal is exciting for each of them.

Things turn physical slowly, and I was glad Lori took her time. A hand held a second too long while dancing. Him steering her through a crowd with a palm at her back, then dropping it fast like it burned him. Her fixing his tie just to stand inside his space. When they do cross lines, the book gets explicit in places, and I will leave the details off the page here. The shape of it is what matters. She pushes. He resists. Then he stops resisting and meets her with a hunger that startles them both. After, he pulls back hard, and she pretends not to care while clearly caring a lot.

That push and pull repeats, and here is where my patience started to fray a little. There are only so many times two adults can say this is a bad idea before the reader starts agreeing a bit too loudly. Gianna chases. Christian warns her off. They give in. He goes cold. She drinks and flirts with someone else to make him jealous. He glares from across the room. Repeat. The scenes stay lively because the dialogue is sharp, but the pattern shows by the two thirds mark.

What saves the loop is that the stakes around them keep rising. This is more than flirting in a vacuum. Every time Gianna drags Christian onto a dance floor or into a back room, she risks his cover. Every time he lingers near her, he risks her safety if his enemies connect them. Friends start to notice. Her family starts to ask who the quiet man is and why he is always near their daughter. The gossip that felt light early on starts to sound like a countdown.

There is a strong scene about halfway where Gianna gets herself into a tight spot at a club by mouthing off to the wrong stranger, and Christian has to step in without blowing his role. He does it with scary ease, smiling while he puts the man down, then turning that same cold face on her in the car after. She is shaken and thrilled and angry all at once. He tells her she could have gotten hurt. She tells him she can take care of herself. Both of them are right, which is why they cannot drop each other even though they should.

Work trouble and Russian pressure

While the romance loops, the crime plot tightens around a rival Russian crew trying to muscle into Chicago business. I will keep this general because the book cares more about pressure than procedure. Shipments go missing. Men turn up beaten. Talk at dinners shifts from weddings to territory. The older bosses act calm in public and furious in private. Gianna hears pieces of it because women in this world hear everything while pretending to hear nothing.

Christian sits in the middle of this squeeze from both sides. His handlers want results. They want names, dates, proof that will hold up. The outfit men he has fooled want loyalty and muscle when things get rough. He has to sit in rooms and nod along with plans he hopes to stop, and hand over just enough to stay trusted without letting anyone get killed. It is the classic mole bind, and Lori writes the tiredness of it better than the tradecraft. You feel how sick he is of lying to people who feed him dinner.

Gianna keeps stumbling closer to the dangerous edge of this fight without meaning to. She knows men who run with the Russian side from parties. She hears a name she should not repeat. She gets followed one night after leaving a club, and only fast help keeps it from turning worse. The book uses these scares to pull Christian closer to her even as he tells himself to back off. He starts checking her car. He tells her which streets to avoid. She hates being managed and loves being protected, and both feelings are true at once.

Her family adds to the pressure in quieter ways. Her father likes Christian well enough but does not trust him, because in their world a man with no clear crew is a man with something to hide. Uncles tease Gianna about settling down, half joking and half serious, and each joke reminds her that her time as the wild single girl is running out. Her mother worries about her drinking and her reputation. The same talk that felt funny in book one feels heavier here, because Gianna is older and the margin for mistakes is thinner.

I liked how the suspense stays street level instead of going big and flashy. There are no huge shootouts for long stretches. There is a tense dinner where two crews share a table and smile with teeth. There is a parking lot stare down after a christening. There is a phone call Christian takes in another room with his voice low, and Gianna listening from the hall with her heart loud. The threat feels close because it keeps showing up in normal places, at parties and restaurants, instead of in warehouses far away.

That said, readers who want a thick crime plot should set hopes low. The Russian angle works as weather more than as a full story. You learn enough to feel the danger, names and slights and one or two sharp acts of violence, but the moves stay vague. Who controls what street. Who owes whom. Why this week is worse than last week. Lori keeps the lens tight on the couple, so the wider war stays blurry. I did not mind much because I was here for the banter, but if you read mafia books for strategy and power plays, this will feel thin.

The best suspense scenes are the small betrayals. A man Christian thought he could trust repeats something he should not have heard. A photo shows up in the wrong hands. Gianna tells a girlfriend a little too much about Christian, and the girlfriend repeats it to impress a boyfriend. Each leak is tiny. Together they build a net. By the last quarter I started dreading every party scene, because I knew someone would say one true thing too loudly and Christian would have to decide fast what to do about it.

When the mask slips

Everything breaks open in the last stretch, and I will keep the turns broad so you can still feel them fresh. Christian's secret comes out, or close enough that it can no longer be smoothed over. Gianna learns the man she has been teasing and kissing has been lying to her since the first night, and not about small things. Her reaction is big and loud and, to me, fair. She feels used. She feels stupid for missing it. She throws his warnings back in his face and tells him to stay away from her family.

The fallout hits both sides. Her people close ranks. If you lie to the outfit, you are an enemy, no matter why you lied. His people remind him that feelings are a luxury he signed away when he took the job. For a few chapters they stay apart, and the book is colder and better for it. Gianna drinks less and thinks more, which I liked. She replays every moment with him and sees the places where he tried to warn her. Christian works with grim focus, tired and angry, and you can see him weighing what the job is still worth.

The danger peaks when the Russian threat stops circling and grabs. Someone Gianna cares about gets caught in the crossfire, and suddenly the abstract war has a face and a hospital room or a missing phone. Christian has to choose between protecting his case and protecting her in daylight where everyone can see. He chooses her, openly, and that choice burns his cover for good. It is the most honest thing he does in the whole book, and it costs him exactly what he always said it would.

I liked that Gianna does not forgive him fast. Too many books rush this part. She makes him earn it. She asks hard questions about what was real and what was watched. He answers without polish, some of which is ugly to hear. He did use her circle to listen. He did write things down. He also fell for her in the middle of it, and stopped writing some things down, which his bosses noticed. That middle truth, that he is guilty and also sincere, felt right for a man who lived a double life too long.

The rescue and the clearing of the air play out the way these books usually do, with a violent night followed by a quiet morning. I will not map every punch. The shape is familiar. People Christian trusted show up. People Gianna trusted fail her. There is blood, and there are apologies that come too late from side characters. What matters is who stands next to whom when it ends. Gianna picks Christian, not because she has forgotten the lies but because she believes the man underneath them. Her family accepts it slowly, with conditions and glares.

The final chapters give the couple a settled glow without pretending the past is clean. There is a family gathering, of course, because these books always end where they live, around food and noise. Gianna is still sharp, still too loud, but steadier. Christian is still quiet, but he sits closer now, and he lets people see that he stays for her rather than for work. It is sweet without being soft. I closed the book liking them more as a pair than I had liked either of them alone at the start.

What I kept and what tired me

This book does banter better than almost any mafia romance I have read lately. Gianna and Christian talk like people who enjoy annoying each other, and their fights have rhythm. I marked half a dozen exchanges in my head to reread. The family texture helps too. The dinners, the christenings, the aunts who feed everyone while gathering gossip, all of it feels warm and specific. Lori knows this corner of Chicago, even if it is a heightened version, and she lets you sit in it.

The heat works if you like possessive heroes and heroines who push back. Christian is jealous and high handed, no question. He tells Gianna where to go and who to avoid. He glares at other men. But Gianna gives as good as she gets, and the book lets her win verbal rounds cleanly. That balance kept the possessiveness fun for me more often than it felt sour. Readers who want soft and equal from page one should skip this shelf entirely, because neither of these two does soft early.

Now the fair complaints, because there are real ones. The book runs long for the story it tells. At 331 pages it is not huge, but the middle chase repeats. Tease, retreat, jealous scene, make up, repeat. I started skimming party scenes around the two thirds mark because I knew the beats. A tighter middle that cut one club night and one family dinner would have left a stronger book. Length alone is not the issue. Repetition is.

The crime plot is thin, as I said above. The Russian crew never becomes more than a looming threat with a few sharp moments. If you want moves and countermoves, look elsewhere. And the possessive alpha act will wear some readers down fast. Christian orders Gianna around in ways that are framed as care, and sometimes they read as control pure and simple. Gianna calls him on it, which helps, but the book still asks you to find his jealousy romantic. Some days I did. Some days I did not.

Who should pick this up. If you liked Sweetest Oblivion and wanted a louder heroine and a colder hero, this is your book. If you like enemies to lovers energy, cat and mouse flirting, and Made family noise with a suspense edge, you will have fun. If you need a tight thriller plot or a gentle hero, pass. I had a good loud weekend with Gianna and Christian, laughed a lot, rolled my eyes a fair bit, and I am glad the series kept going after them.

FAQ

Is The Maddest Obsession part of a series?

Yes. It is Made book two, published in 2019 after Sweetest Oblivion, set in the same Chicago outfit world.

Who are the main characters?

Gianna, a sharp-tongued young woman from the outfit circle, and Christian Allister, a secretive man with ties to law enforcement.

How long is the book and who published it?

The Independently Published edition runs 331 pages with ISBN 9781093765007.