Rating: ★★☆☆☆

Genre: Dark Romance / Mafia Romance / Historical Romance

Available On: Amazon & Audible

After devouring Haunting Adeline and Hunting Adeline, I went into Phantom with high expectations. H.D. Carlton has a knack for dark, obsessive romance. Twisted, raw, and impossible to put down. Genuinely, I didn’t expect to like the Cat and Mouse Duet as much as I did. I was reading it more for curiosity than because I thought I’d find it enjoyable.

And yet, I found the series (and Hunting Adeline in particular) to be astonishingly cathartic. Those books healed something in me that I wasn’t entirely conscious was broken until reading that book.

And Phantom, set in the deliciously gothic Parsons Manor and following the sultry, sexy tale of Adeline’s great-grandmother and her own ‘stalker’… well, it just had to be epic.

Right?

Well… not so much. There were parts of the novel I did enjoy. But something didn’t sit right with me about this one from the start. I kept putting it down. Kept feeling… off. And it took me longer than I’d like to admit to figure out why.

Without being too spoilery (particularly for those who haven’t read Haunting Adeline), here’s my honest take on where this one fell short and the one character I just couldn’t get past.

Ronaldo Gives Me The Ick

I dislike Ronaldo, that’s the issue. He’s cringey. I don’t find him sexy or appealing. He lacks the animalistic appeal of Zade, and when he says supposedly sexy things to her, I found myself just… well, laughing, most of the time. Telling her “I’m so proud of you” because she’s giving good head? What an infantilising thing to say to a woman.

I get that this is supposed to be her sexual awakening and she’s unaccustomed to things like this. But… seriously? You’re calling her a whore while talking to her like a child, and telling her you’re going to fuck her while her husband’s forced to watch and you dismember him

What are you aiming for here, dude? You’re making her cry about her husband while she’s sucking you off.

You’re calling her a whore and a slut, okay, fine. You want her to be slutty for you. Put out for you. Do things for you she’s never done for another man. All good. But don’t baby her while she’s doing it. That’s just… I don’t know.

Off-putting. Vaguely hilarious.

It gave me the ick.

And to be honest, it wasn’t the first thing about him that did. I struggled to get through this one. I really did. And that’s after devouring Haunting and Hunting Adeline. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what kept making me put it down.

Not until I hit this scene in Chapter 27 and suddenly realised: I don’t like Ronaldo.

In hindsight, I should have realised this was the issue sooner. Every time he calls Genevieve “Mia Rosa” (which, honestly, is every other sentence) I cringed.

One scene fairly early on literally had me gagging. I was out on a hike, listening while I walked, and genuinely thought I’d hurl. It wasn’t graphic or depraved or anything like that. It was just… ick.

I’m not even sure I can type it to explain without gagging again, but I shall try…

Ronaldo cups his hand, collects Genevieve’s cum, and then laps it up.

Nope. Made me gag again.

I’ve no idea what it is about this that got me, especially considering the content of the rest of the book—and previous books by H.D. Carlton—but it was just… ick.

Ronaldo, I’m afraid, gives me the ick.

Why The Ick Is A Bigger Problem In Phantom

The wider issue with disliking Ronaldo, beyond not liking the character himself, is the knock-on effect it has on my opinion of Genevieve. Because when Addy falls for Zade, we understand why. Yes, he’s got darkness, but his specific manner of darkness and the way he wields it becomes its own form of light.

Ronaldo is just an unpleasant person. He is not violent and murderous for righteous reasons—he just likes killing people. He doesn’t limit himself to bad people. He only helps people if it furthers his own agenda or desires.

Gigi is a married woman, and I’ve discussed at length my own thoughts on having main characters that cheat, and the problematic nature of that in fiction. Nightshade is a forbidden romance involving a married man. It’s problematic. And Gigi here isn’t just having an emotional love affair—she’s having a full-blown affair.

And we understand why. We condone it, in her case, because of the time she’s living in, the impossibility of extricating herself from her marriage, and the hideous way her husband treats her.

But there is the issue I have with this book—the real issue.
Gigi falls for Ronaldo because he offers an escape from the shitshow she’s married to. And she’s so desperate to escape that man, that any man will do. Ronaldo is simply there, and willing. She doesn’t fall for him because he’s her perfect match—there’s no grand romance. He’s just what she needs, when she needs it.

And for me, unfortunately, that just isn’t it. Not when I’m reading about a grand love affair.

If this was a tale of Gigi’s awakening, in which Ronaldo was a tool she used to extricate herself from a bad situation—or a fun fling that served its purpose and ran its course—I could get behind it. I’d have no issue with that.

But for her to believe she’s madly in love with this man when there’s absolutely nothing appealing about him… well, it also gives me the ick.

It makes me feel like her actions and emotions are trauma responses rather than genuine love.

On the other side of things, Ronaldo’s feelings for Gigi—while deep and obsessive and every bit as fucked up as Zade’s—never seem to go beyond the superficial.

He never has a single thought about why he loves her, why he needs her, what it is about her—as opposed to every other woman out there—that has him fascinated. The result is the impression that it’s actually an incredibly shallow attraction.

He likes how she looks. He likes the way she fawns over him and how it makes him feel. He likes fucking her.

I can’t see the love anywhere.

Why Phantom Falls A Bit Flat Compared To Other HD Carlton Books

Part of the problem, I think, is that their love affair was never meant to be a main plot. It worked beautifully as a side plot in Haunting Adeline, when we saw snippets of things that happened and didn’t know enough about their dynamic to realise how shallow it was.

Carlton’s fleshed out the original diary entries into a full story, but there still isn’t much of an actual story happening. There’s no real plot. No mystery, no intrigue. The central couple immediately want each other—there’s no push-pull relationship as Gigi fights it and rationalises it.

She just suddenly, inexplicably, decides this man is distracting her from the trainwreck of her marriage and she’s going to fall madly in love with him.

And she does.

And they hook up.

Meanwhile, her husband does dumb shit, and events tick along in the direction we already know this thing is going to end.

Possibly, if you’re reading this without having first read Haunting Adeline, it’s more enjoyable. I’m purposefully avoiding spoilers here for those who don’t know how this thing ends.

But for me, I felt there was a wealth of potential here that was wasted. John is superficially drawn to be a drunk, a gambler, a rapist, and an absolute wretch.
His character has no depth, his actions have no nuance.

But he had to be—because otherwise Gigi’s affair wouldn’t have been so very understandable. Had Ronaldo been a huge, powerful, charismatic, irresistible character with great depth and wonder about him, John could also have been a bit less two-dimensional.

But with such a flat lover, the only way to make Ronaldo seem the better option was to make John a hate sink.

So Gigi suffers as a character because Ronaldo is ick.

John suffers because he’s shallow and poorly drawn.

And the plot as a whole (what little there is of it) suffers because none of the characters are actually doing anything.

They can’t.

They’re too flat.

There’s also a repetitive nature to the story that was inevitable for those who’ve read Haunting Adeline, but is doubled down on by the format of this book. It may have been for completeness, or to pad things out, or to mirror the format of Haunting Adeline (which was so successful), where chapters or chunks of chapters were often bookended with diary entries.

Diary entries feature at the start of each chapter in Phantom. But they’re entries those who’ve read Haunting Adeline have seen before, for the most part, and they’re also repeated within the chapters themselves.

So the events recounted in the diary then happen in the chapter, or happened in the chapter prior. It gets even worse towards the end of the book when Gigi starts reading her diary entries aloud to Ronaldo—yet the same entry then appears as the next diary entry.

Honestly, the first time that happened I thought I’d accidentally skipped back on my audiobook.

There is also a lyrical quality to H.D. Carlton’s writing that is beautiful, but isn’t quite as present in Phantom as it was in Haunting and Hunting Adeline.

If I have to hear coquettishly one more time I may scream.

It’s a spectacular word, and I LOVED it the first time it appeared. But after the twentieth, I was heartily sick of it.

The Saving Grace For This Novel

As much as Gigi’s motivations and emotions where Ronaldo is concerned are problematic, Gigi is still the saving grace of this story. The fact she throws Ronaldo’s ridiculous words right back at him—taking that power back for herself, speaking to him just as he did to her—goes a long way toward compensating for how ick I found Ronaldo.

Ronaldo wishes to kill John so Gigi can be free. Gigi, in fact, could free herself if she chose, but chooses to stay. She chooses to protect her daughter rather than subject her to either a divorce or the death of her father. She knows she couldn’t live with that choice, so she chooses otherwise—and she’s frustrated by Ronaldo’s inability to understand that things can’t be the way he envisions.

He’s in the mafia, which she largely ignores, but she still has the balls to stand up to him. And she does this from the very start. Her backbone is fucking steel. She may crawl on the floor to him for fun, but she’s utterly certain in her sense of self, where her boundaries are, what she’s willing to do, and also what is realistic.

Gigi is a formidable character, despite her apparently demure, almost diminutive position as John’s wife. She’s created this life, this pocket world for herself and her family. This gloriously gothic mansion she is utterly unapologetic about, despite the fact it makes her something of an outcast. She’s quite content, to some extent, with her life—knowing she’s an excellent mother, raising a wonderful daughter, in a beautiful and well-kept home.

Her dissatisfaction only becomes apparent when John jeopardises that life, and recolours everything. He mocks the beautiful home she’s created. He dismisses her, undermines her, takes her for granted—outright denies she does anything for him or the family. His stance is that she’s an object there for his pleasure and convenience, and at times he enforces this belief.

Once she realises this is his true opinion, it changes how she views herself, her life, and the life they’ve built together. It cracks her open—and at that exact moment, another man steps in. Someone mysterious, intriguing, dangerous—but strong.

As strong as she is.

Unlike John, who she now sees is weak.

Gigi falls for Ronaldo’s strength, his stoicism, his conviction in his beliefs. The fact that she draws a line—and he upholds it—not just by refusing to cross it himself, but by ensuring others respect her boundaries too.

Genevieve is a phenomenal character.

It’s just a shame she wasn’t written a lover with more depth, and given a plot with more teeth.