Cartel: a mum’s dark romance book of bikies, drug cartels

• by: Blanche Clark
• From: Herald Sun
• February 13, 2015

Australian author Jessica Roscoe, pen name Lili St Germain. Picture: Supplied Source: Supplied

DON’T be fooled by Jessica Roscoe’s sweet, almost cherubic, smile. The congenial Perth mother is bound to be thinking murderous and violent thoughts for her erotically charged drug cartel series as she calmly wheels her trolley down the aisle at the supermarket.

“When people meet me they usually say, ‘You look really sweet. Are you sure you’re the person who wrote these books?’,” she says.
“Those books” are the wildly successful dark romance novellas Gypsy Brothers, written under the pseudonym Lili St. Germain and devoured by more than 250,000 people.
Readers in the US, UK and Australia have become hooked on the story of 21-year-old Juliette, who becomes bikie leader Dornan Ross’s lover in order to kill his seven sons and avenge the murder of her father, only to fall in love with his youngest son.

Based on the success of the seven 100-page novellas, which sell for $3 each online, Roscoe, 30, has scored a major publishing deal with HarperCollins and the first in a Gypsy Brothers spin-off trilogy, Cartel, is out in print this month.

It has turned her family life upside down. Her husband has quit his high-powered mining job to stay home and look after their two-year-old daughter while Roscoe writes the second book in the trilogy, which will come out at the end of this year.

The trajectory of her success mirrors the initial response to E.L. James and her erotic Fifty Shades of Grey series. In the same way James shocked suburbia with bondage and spanking, Roscoe has some readers gasping at the extreme violence, language and sex in her books.
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