ABOUT THE NIKKI SERAFINO SERIES
What does it cost to survive? Can I remain ethical in broken systems? How do I fight the wolves without becoming one? And what happens when the person I love most has already made a different choice?
These are questions NIKKI SERAFINO lives — through the discipline of her body, the dedication to her work, and the relationships she’s built on her own exacting terms. Across seven books, the answers to those questions are going to cost her everything.
Nikki is a local civilian investigator embedded with the US Navy in Naples, a city she knows from the inside and an institution she capably navigates. She is formidably proficient, rigorously trained, and principled in ways that make her genuinely dangerous to the systems around her. She has built a life in Naples that reflects those values: a boat she co-owns and has rebuilt from the hull up, a platonic partnership with a Neapolitan cop that defies every social convention, and a relationship with a man she loves while struggling to maintain her independence. She has looked at this city — violent, corrupt, breathtakingly beautiful — and decided to live in it on her own terms.
That decision is what this series is about.
Because across the city, her childhood sweetheart TITO CALANDRA — a man who once stood beside her — has become the most sophisticated organized crime figure in southern Italy. Tito concluded, long ago, that the only way to protect the people you love in a city run by wolves is to become the most dangerous wolf. He carries his own moral logic, his own form of love, his own answer to the same question. Tito and Nikki are two sides of the same coin. But their paths diverged fifteen years ago, on the night Nikki’s brother was shot — and the tension between them is charged with everything they once were to each other, and everything they have since become.
That tension is the engine that drives the Nikki Serafino series. It deepens with every season, and it builds across seven books, toward something neither of them can yet fully understand: a threat rooted in the covert world of Nikki's mother, and the international network that destroyed her. When that threat finally becomes visible, Nikki and Tito will have no choice but to stand together. Every season of this series is the architecture of that moment.
SAVAGE CITY is a propulsive crime thriller that begins in the streets and institutions of contemporary Naples — and expands, season by season, into the hidden architecture of international intelligence, military corruption, and the men who use power to buy silence. It is set in one of the world's most cinematically extraordinary cities, inside institutions rendered with authentic precision. This is Mediterranean Noir - the gritty realism of Gomorrahmixed with the sleek, high-stakes tension of The Night Manager.
The authenticity of the Nikki Serafino series comes from a writer who spent a decade embedded in the US Navy, deployed aboard ships across Europe and Africa, stationed at the US Navy headquarters in Naples, and working with law enforcement and intelligence agencies on multiple continents.
I lived inside these worlds, and witnessed how power protects itself. This story is everything I saw and couldn't say.
Two novels are in print — May the Wolf Die (2024) and Children of the Savage City(2026), both published by Penguin Random House — with a third in progress and the full seven-book arc mapped. The hidden threads introduced in Book 1 are already developing in Book 2. The architecture is already constructed and ready to go.