Mila Finelli Books in Order

Mila Finelli is the dark romance pen name of USA Today bestselling author Joanna Shupe, and that split name tells you a lot about her range. As Joanna Shupe, she built a loyal readership with historical romance, especially stories set in the crowded, glittering world of Gilded Age New York. As Mila Finelli, she turns to contemporary mafia romance, keeping the same interest in power, chemistry, and people who want each other at exactly the wrong time.

Joanna was born in Ohio and has described her childhood as a comfortable Midwestern one, full of books, sports, family, and comfort food. She later went to college in Florida, earned a journalism degree, and spent her adult years in Chicago and New York before settling in New Jersey with her husband and two daughters.

Writing was not some random second act.

She has said she loved history from a young age, thanks in part to Schoolhouse Rock, and in college she tore through romance novels and started imagining stories of her own. Journalism gave her a way into a life built around words, but romance fiction is where she landed. In 2013, she won the Golden Heart Award for Best Historical, an early sign that her mix of research, heat, and emotional momentum was connecting.

A lot of readers first meet her through the Joanna Shupe books. Titles like The Heiress Hunt, The Lady Gets Lucky, The Duke Gets Even, and The Gilded Heiress show what she does so well on the historical side: ambitious women, stubborn men, social pressure, money, sex, and a city that feels alive around the romance. Her Gilded Age New York is full of theaters, mansions, newspapers, business deals, and private longing hiding behind public polish.

Then the darker lane opened up.

On her Mila Finelli site, she says Mafia Mistress came to her during the pandemic in a kind of fever dream, and that story became the start of The Kings of Italy. Beginning with Fausto and Francesca in Mafia Mistress and Mafia Darling, then widening through books like Mafia Madman, Mafia Target, and Mafia Virgin, she writes obsession, revenge, loyalty, forced proximity, and family structures that make every private choice feel dangerous.

Her newer New York State of Mafia books, starting with Empire of Temptation and Empire of Seduction, shift some of that intensity into a more modern American setting shaped by mob families, business battles, hidden identities, and moneyed lifestyles. The surface can look sleek, but the emotional stakes are still rough. Across both names, she keeps circling similar questions: who holds the power, what desire can overturn, and how a heroine protects herself in a world that keeps trying to decide her future for her.

She clearly likes morally gray men.

But one reason readers follow her from Joanna Shupe to Mila Finelli is that the women push back just as hard. Whether she is writing a Gilded Age heiress or a mafia bride, her heroines bargain, resist, scheme, and keep their own appetites. These days she lives in New Jersey and writes in both modes, one full of ballrooms and old New York ambition, the other packed with compounds, wine, guns, and very bad boundaries. The through line is easy to spot: high emotion, strong attraction, and characters who never get an easy way out.