It’s 1944 in Seattle. World War II is in full swing in Europe. Genevieve “Gigi” Parsons is a housewife living at Parsons Manor, a gothic house her husband John Parsons built for her. They have a 14-year-old daughter named Sera. John runs a successful accounting business. However, recently he has started drinking and gambling excessively, to the point where they are about the lose the house. Their marriage is deteriorating. John has started to abuse his wife, both emotionally and physically.
Eventually, Gigi finds out that John’s gambling debts are to the mafia. Around that time, she notices a mysterious man watching her from the shadows of the woods outside her home. Eventually, the man enters the house and the two start a love affair. Gigi is torn between her safe but boring life with her faltering husband and her daughter, and the passionate affair with Ronaldo Capello. She learns that Ronaldo works for the mob and has his eyes on her husband.
The passion scenes between Ronaldo and Gigi are abundant and the book is basically just porn.
Yes, porn.
Of the 326 pages, I am sure half of them are just graphic and explicit porn, nothing else. Carlton is a pretty good writer, so rather than just building transitions between the Chi Chi Bow Bow scenes, she weaves the porn into a novel with a full plot and a World War II mafia story. But I get kept getting the feeling that the entire story was just there so we could read about the great sex they were having all the time.
I have never read any romance novels; I guess this was my first and last one. I remember reading Fanny Hill by John Cleland when I was 15 or 16, and I remember it was highly erotic (to the teenager I was, of course). This is much more explicit, but I am not a teenager anymore, so it really didn’t interest me much.
When I researched the author after reading the book, I learned that Phantom is a prequel to the “Cat & Mouse Universe” books by the same author, but readable as a standalone story. It combines gothic elements, historical fiction, and mafia stuff with morally gray characters and intense emotional and sensual tension.
Carlton is a bestselling fiction author known for dark romance and thriller novels. While this stuff is not for me, the writing is actually pretty good. I will give it one and a half stars.
