Night of The Phantom - Anne Stuart

Continuing my expoloration of Anne Stuart's back list this time I read Night of the Phantom. It's a 1991 edition and I think it shows. I could feel some of recurrent themes in her later books like beauty and the beast, ghosts, dark and brooding hero but it didn't make for such a strong story as some of her others.

Between dawn and dusk, Ethan Winslowe's weird mansion was as still as a crypt. Beneath its maze of gloomy corridors, its owner slept far from reach of the sun. As night fell, and fears and phantasms rose to haunt her, Megan Carey was led down to his underground lair -- to dine with a phantom she never saw, who remained a dark shape hidden among shadows. Reputation had it that Ethan was a genius, madman and monster. And Megan was Ethan's prisoner, held fast by a threat stronger than chains.... And by a hunger to know the heat of Ethan's passion, which raged like a fire in the night.

I blame it on the main characters (and maybe on having Fabio on the cover), they just never seemed real enough, strong enough and the whole setting is not dark enough for gothic material. On the other hand other things seemed a bit too much like the fanatics from the town. I know I have enjoyed other Stuart books I've read with the same characteristics as this one and enjoyed them more, maybe one of the problems is that I've been reading a bunch of them one after the other and I'm overdosing. Well anyway it's not a bad book and it didn't annoy me so I'm giving it a B-.