Shadowed Loyalty ~ Review

Shadowed Loyalty

By Roseanna M. White

Sabina Mancari appears to have it all, but she feels unneeded and unwanted since her sister's death. Allowing these feelings to grow makes her susceptible to a man's admiration who uses her to get to her father. The man she thought loved her is determined to bring down her father as part of his work as a Prohibition agent. With nowhere else to turn, she calls on her childhood friend and her fiancé of three years.


Lorenzo (aka Enzo) has loved Sabina all her life and looks forward to the day that he can marry her and be free of all ties to the life they grew up in. Enzo knows that the life his family is caught up in is wrong, and he wants to break free, working not for any of Chicago's families but for himself and Sabina. But when Sabina calls asking for his help in getting her father out of custody, he finds himself caught on the edge of a life he doesn't want. Worse, the man who betrayed Sabina has caused a rift in their relationship with mere months until their wedding. 

As Enzo and Sabina work through everything, they also work to strengthen and rebuild their relationship and the truth they once shared. Sabina has lost her belief in her father's integrity and honesty, believing that her father was different from the other bosses in Chicago's Sicilian community.

What's sad is that the things they were trying to escape in Italy were the very things they brought with them. The underworld of Chicago's Sicilian underworld was not pretty. If it was illegal or immoral, they most likely dabbled in it. Sadly, the American Dream they searched for was lost in their inability to break the bonds that bind them to the world they left behind. Shadowed Loyalty is a look at Chicago in the 1920s, a world in flux as it is about to change. Prohibition was the reason behind the government's interest in the families, but this wasn't the only catalyst for the coming changes, and not all of them were looking to improve conditions for those caught in this dark and evil world. As Sabina and Enzo learn, it is only through faith in God and leaning on prayer that they could break free and withstand the assaults on their souls.

As with all of Roseanna M. White's works, one can see that a lot of research went into this book. The attention to detail is impressive, and the various characters have a depth to them that brings this book to life. For anyone wanting a squeaky clean read, that is not happening, not if the book is historically accurate. There isn't anything depicted per se, but abuses and violence are mentioned. I mean, this is the mob, and they profited off the evils of the day.

I was provided a complimentary copy of this book with no expectations but that I provide my honest opinion ~ all thoughts expressed are my own.

About the Book:

Sabina Mancari never questioned her life as the daughter of Chicago’s leading mob boss until bullets tore apart her world. The man she thought she loved turned out to be an undercover Prohibition agent. Now she sees how ugly the underworld can be. Ambushes, bribes, murder, prostitution—she thought her beloved Papa was above all that, but clearly, he isn’t. What does that mean, though, for her and their family? Maybe Lorenzo, the fiancé who has barely paid her any attention in the last two years, has the right idea by planning to escape their world.

All his life, Lorenzo’s family assumed he would join the Church, but he had different ideas—marrying Sabina and pursuing a career in the law. But despite his morals, he knows at the core he isn’t so unlike his father and brothers, which has always terrified him. Has he, in trying to protect Sabina from his flaws, in fact, harmed her? It sure seems that way when he realizes he all but forced her into the arms of the Prohibition Agent, now bent on tearing her family apart at all costs. But how can they rebuild what has so long been neglected…and do it in the shadow of the dark empire of the Mafia?

Shadowed Loyalty, set amid the glitz and scandal of the Roaring Twenties, examines what love really means and how we draw lines between family and our own convictions, especially when following the one could mean losing the other.