Hello, Junior

Let’s start with Junior. As an MMC, Nick is appealing. He’s suitably morally grey, twisted, and angst-ridden, yet oddly vulnerable and, at times, genuinely funny. He’s the right hand of his mafia father, and on paper you’d assume this is a full-blown mafia romance. 

It isn’t. 

At best, it’s mafia-adjacent.

We’re told Nick has done terrible things. We’re reminded frequently that his life is steeped in violence and crime. But we rarely see any of it. Aside from burying a box and a handful of similarly minor acts, Junior’s mafia life exists almost entirely off-page. Given that his arc is centred around escape, that makes some narrative sense, but the result is that the core plot is just as weak as Lights Out’s was.

The entire book is carried by the romance, the sex, and the tension between Nick and Lauren.

To be clear, that isn’t inherently a problem. Nick and Lo are a very enjoyable couple, and I found their relationship considerably more interesting than Josh and Aly’s in Lights Out. There’s more emotional weight here, more longing, more history, and far more satisfying sexual tension.

But if you’re after a plot you can really sink your teeth into, this isn’t it.

If you’re after a true mafia romance, this also isn’t it.

The Heavy Handed Issue With Caught Up

What Caught Up is, however, is a very good gateway drug into both mafia romance and dark romance more broadly. It’s sharp, funny, and portrays the world of kink clubs and cam girls in the most realistic way I’ve personally seen done in romance.

Lauren is a cam girl. She lives with two flatmates, one of whom is also a cam girl, while the other edits their videos and is… problematic in a way that feels intentionally so. As a side character and best friend, Taylor worked for me. She was reasonably well-rounded and genuinely funny.

Where this side of the book falters is in how forced some of it feels.

There’s quite a lot of time spent with the flatmates and their dog. While Fred (the cat in Lights Out) was a genuinely delightful addition, the dog here feels like an attempt to replicate that success, and it doesn’t quite land. 

It feels like the book is trying to be cute and funny, whereas Fred just was cute and funny.

A similar issue crops up with Ryan, a nonbinary side character. On paper, Ryan is a good character: well-rounded, with clear agency and even a small subplot of their own. My issue wasn’t with their inclusion, or with nonbinary representation (in fact, I applaud that and loved to see it!), but with how unnaturally it was handled.

The use of ‘they’ and ‘them’ for Ryan is so excessive that it feels deliberate to the point of distraction. Scenes involving Ryan read as though they were written to cram in as many pronoun uses as possible, as if to make absolutely certain the reader understands that THEY ARE NONBINARY. 

There’s a natural cadence to pronoun usage in prose, and good editing usually aims to reduce repetition. Here, it felt like the opposite choice had been made, solely because Ryan’s pronouns are nonbinary.

As a result, what could have been strong LGBTQ+ representation ends up feeling performative rather than organic.

Oh, Lo

Something similar happens with Lauren herself. It isn’t enough for her to be a cam girl on OnlyFans (yes, it’s given a different fake name, but we all know it’s OnlyFans), who is happy and content in her work, a stakeholder in a kink club, and someone determined not to settle for a man who doesn’t fully respect her career, and view it as a legitimate career. 

Those things alone would have been more than sufficient.

But Lauren is also a vocal political advocate for sex workers’ rights, and those discussions are shoehorned in repeatedly. Again, the issue isn’t the subject matter. It’s the execution. The messaging is so heavy-handed that it feels like the book is shouting its intentions at the reader rather than trusting them to engage with the themes naturally.

Worse, Lauren suffers from the same limitation Aly did in Lights Out: this is her entire personality. She’s a cam girl. She has kinks. She has a dog.

That’s it.

It’s Still A Great Read

The limitations are a shame, because the narrative, kink exploration, and humour make this a genuinely enjoyable read. I’m very much looking forward to the next book in the series. I just hope it does three things differently:

1. Gives the main plot enough space to be more than a footnote
2. Allows the FMC to have a full personality beyond the ‘job + kinks’ formula
3. Makes the series-wide mask motif actually relevant to the character wearing it

Josh’s mask kink in Lights Out was grounded in strong character work and directly tied to Aly’s obsession with MaskTok. (Yes, it was referred to as her ‘favourite social media platform’ and not named as TikTok, but we all know it’s TikTok.) In Caught Up, the biker helmet feels painfully shallow. Nick rides his bike from A to B, Aly thirsts after him once before knowing who he is, and … that’s it.

Nick spends more time wearing a disposable anonymity mask provided by Velvet than he ever does wearing the helmet. The mask feels like an attempt to replicate the success of Lights Out, much like the dog feels like an attempt to replicate Fred. 

Both fall short because they lack the character-rooted reasoning and natural humour that made the originals work.

Let’s Talk Spice And Kinks

All of that said, Caught Up is a great book. It’s fun, it’s a quick read, and while there’s a lot of on-page spice.

The spice in Caught Up leans heavily into kink-club dynamics, voyeurism, exhibitionism, power exchange, and long-simmering obsession finally given permission to surface. There’s a strong emphasis on watching and being watched, control negotiated rather than seized, and sex that’s tied closely to emotional tension rather than shock value. It’s explicit, yes, but also deliberately varied, using kink as a way to explore trust, history, and desire rather than just escalation for its own sake.

Highlights include a scandalous encounter in a confessional and Nick taking Lauren on a nostalgia trip to fulfil a fantasy she had about him as a teenager. If you’ve read Bane, you know I love a bit of high school crush wish fulfilment!

The sex was without a doubt the highlight of this book. Yes, it’s still funny, but I found the spicy scenes far better than in Lights Out. There’s more variety, it serves the characters and their relationship more effectively, and (for me at least) it was significantly hotter. 

Despite being just as detailed, it never tipped into boredom the way some scenes in Lights Out did.

Final Verdict On Caught Up

It’s an odd juxtaposition. In some ways, Allen’s writing has clearly matured. In others, it feels slightly try-hard. As though she’s replicating the most popular elements of Lights Out without fully understanding that they worked because they were new.

Different.

It reminds me of the second Pirates of the Caribbean film. Half the jokes fall flat because they’re callbacks to moments that were funny the first time. The points everyone pointed to as making the original film great.

They can’t make the sequel great, they don’t belong in the sequel. Out of context, they’re no longer clever, or funny, or shocking, or squeal worthy. 

They’re just try hard.

Which is frustrating. Because when Caught Up works, it really works.