Haunting Adeline – H.D. Carlton PDF, ePub, Mobi

Synopsis

Having a stalker is terrible, but Adeline is addicted to fear. Adeline gets a stalker when she recently moved into her grandmother’s house, which she inherited. He’s not your typical stalker, though.

He can enter her house undetected and bypass her security system. As if being pursued wasn’t enough, she discovers her great-grandmother’s journals, which reveal she had a stalker, whom she fell in love with.

It appears that history repeats itself, because Adeline wants to establish that her great-grandmother was murdered by a stalker so that she, too, may convince herself that all stalkers are psychopaths.

He’s developed a new interest. One that makes him feel things he never thought he could. While pursuing all of these trafficking groups, he struggles to keep his thoughts from returning to the girl who is his infatuation. After all, if he has any say in the matter, she will love him.

Trigger Warning

This book is a dark romance with graphic violence, dub/non con, and themes such as child trafficking and human sacrifice. If you have any triggers, this story may not be for you.

Review

Check the trigger warnings before even considering reading this one. I like dark romances and have read a number of them (from tame to very extreme), and this one definitely falls on the extreme end of the range.

Haunting Adeline tells the story of Addie, an author who lives alone in the haunted manor that her grandmother left her. Soon after moving in, she finds a horrible secret: her great-grandmother was murdered in that house, and the culprit was never apprehended. As if that weren’t enough, Addie begins to notice parallels between her own life and that of her dead grandmother, the most notable being that each had a stalker.

Addie has just realized that she has been watched both inside and outside the house. Her stalker isn’t going away, and the more she reads in her great-grandmother’s notebooks, the more she suspects that history is repeating itself.

Haunting Adeline actually freaked me out. The haunted manor was enough to make me feel like I should only read during the day, but add in Zade, Addie’s fairly terrifying stalker, and it brought it to a whole other level. While I didn’t get the impression that the spirits of Addie’s house were malicious or intended to harm her, they were unsettling. If you live alone, you may begin to hear things that aren’t necessarily there.

It’s difficult for me to express my views about Addie and Zade’s connection. Addie’s stalker is Zade. He doesn’t try to hide his obsession with her, and Addie never makes light of how their relationship began. When it comes to Addie, Zade is a bad person. If you’re hoping for a typical romance, this is not the book for you.

However, I really enjoyed Zade and Addie together. He brought out her sarcastic side, and she was never afraid to put him in his place. The chemistry between the two was out of this world. Things were dark, kinky, and immensely sensual between Zade and Addie.

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The mystery element was skillfully done, but don’t anticipate anything particularly new or startling. Early on, it was rather obvious what had happened to Addie’s great-grandmother. I don’t think it detracted from my enjoyment because it was simply a minor storyline point in the story.

My main criticism is that I found Addie and Zade to be fairly flat characters. Addie didn’t seem to have much personality, and her attraction to Zade appeared to be mainly physical. She talked a lot about his appearance but never got into the qualities of his personality that she was drawn to.

Apart from being Addie’s stalker, the only thing we know about Zade is that he works to stop sex trafficking. To be honest, it felt forced and was referenced frequently as a method to atone for the wrongs he was doing to Addie.

Overall, Haunting Adeline is in between mediocre and good. It had a lot of potential but occasionally went flat. I liked it enough to buy the sequel, especially after the cliffhanger finish.  I honestly believe H.D. Carlton is an author to investigate, but I’m not sure if this is the one to start with.