Haunting Adeline

The review

Genuinely one of the most divisive books in the genre. Adeline inherits her great-grandmother's manor and acquires a stalker: Zade, who is hunting human traffickers and has decided she belongs to him. CW: every dark-romance trigger you can name. If you read the trigger list and still want in, this is the gold standard of the modern stalker-romance wave. Five peppers, and that's with respect.

Carlton runs two timelines. In the present, Adeline settles into the old family house and slowly realizes she is being watched. In the past, her great-grandmother's diaries from the same house unspool a separate story with secrets of its own. The dual structure gives the book a gothic spine that most stalker romances never bother to build.

Zade is the point, and the problem. He is a vigilante hacker who dismantles trafficking rings, and he treats Adeline's boundaries as puzzles to solve. The book does not pretend any of that is healthy. It is written as a dark fantasy for readers who know exactly what they are opting into, and it never asks you to approve of him in daylight.

The heat: five peppers, earned. The intimate scenes are frequent, explicit and built around consent that is deliberately blurred, with dub-con and power play doing the heavy lifting. If the trigger list in the front of the book reads like a dare to you, you are the audience. If it reads like a warning, believe it.

Know before you start: this is book one of a duet and it ends on a hard cliffhanger. Hunting Adeline picks up straight after and shifts the story toward the trafficking plot, which is darker still. Read the author's content warnings below first. Then decide. If you are in, clear a weekend; the second half moves fast and the last chapters do not let up.