RIGHT OF SURVIVORSHIP

Mairead Kilbride is a hospice nurse in Fishtown, Philadelphia — the kind of woman who knows how to be present in a room without anyone noticing how carefully she’s watching it. She’s been watching her own life the same way for eight months, staying fine by staying busy, and not thinking too hard about the box of her grandmother’s things she never opened.

Then a solicitor’s office calls with a complication.

A 1961 deed. Her grandmother’s name alongside Seamus Halloran’s on forty-three Philadelphia properties. A marriage nobody dissolved, and a survivorship clause that transferred everything to Mae the moment Brigid died.

Now she’s in a conference room with Tiernan Halloran at the opposite end of the table, and the men by the door aren’t there for decoration, and the number he puts in front of her is the kind that makes people go quiet and agreeable.

She doesn’t take the money.

What Tiernan offers instead is a marriage — one that makes their names joint tenants of each other and removes the incentive to acquire her interest through her death. Before she can decide what she actually thinks about him, there’s an archive she reads faster than anyone expected; a garden she recognizes from her grandmother’s letters without knowing how it got here; a kitchen at 11pm when the professional distance finally runs out; and the quality of his attention — not protection, not management, something she stops trying to name and starts accepting instead.

She’s spent five years being fully present for dying people without ever asking for the same in return. He’s spent fourteen years in rooms where everyone performs — and has never been in one with someone his position can’t touch.

Dark Irish mafia romance where the legal trap becomes a real choice before either of them names it. The kind of book where you understand the survivorship clause by the end in a way you didn’t expect to.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ Romance > Mafia sits at 11.7 sales-to-comp (Hot Mainstream) with 186 estimated daily sales per top-20 title — and 100% of the top 20 are KU-enrolled, making this a direct-path discoverability play

→ Irish is the highest-index mafia attribute in the market — sales-vs-competition index of 99 against only 5% book share; the demand exists, the supply gap is real, and this package is built directly into it

→ Forced marriage + possessive deliver $544K/month combined in estimated royalties across 12% and 11% of titles respectively — the trope stack is proven; the bidirectional survivorship mechanic is the structural differentiation that makes this specific package memorable and socially shareable

→ Series read-through is built into the premise — Lorcan Slattery and Eamon Halloran are seeded as full characters in Book 1, with their setups visible in the epilogue; a three-book series compounds the initial launch across the full Halloran Succession arc

→ Dual-category positioning in Romance > Mafia and MTS > Crime Fiction > Organized Crime captures romance readers and crime fiction crossover simultaneously — the Organized Crime category has held Hot Mainstream status since 2016

→ The social hook writes itself — “he married her to save it and the clause runs both ways” is one sentence that travels; the property law mechanic is specific enough to be memorable and novel enough that readers explain it to each other

TROPES:
• Forced Marriage
• Possessive Protector
• Enemies to Lovers
• Forced Proximity
• Morally Gray Hero
• Secret Legacy
• Marriage of Convenience
• Dark Romance
• Found Family 

HEAT LEVEL: Open Door / High Spice 

Perfect for fans of: Ana Night, Ivy Layne, Lena Little, and Nicole Fox