The Book Where the Stalker Wins and I Let Him

A stalker, a serial killer, and a woman who should absolutely call the police

Here’s the setup, stripped of spoilers: Adeline Reilly has been stalked by a man named Zade Meadows since she was a teenager. Not “sends flowers” stalked. Watches-her-through-windows, knows-her-schedule, has-been-in-her-house stalked. By the time Hunting Adeline picks up (this is book two, following Haunting Adeline, so you need that one first or none of this will land), Zade has more or less kidnapped her, and also, casually, it turns out he might be a serial killer with a body count and a moral code that only applies to people he’s decided deserve it.

That’s the premise. I want to be honest that typing it out like that makes it sound insane, because it is insane. Adeline is smart, funny, foul-mouthed, and by any reasonable metric should be running for the hills or the nearest precinct. Instead the book asks you to watch her fall for the man who has been terrorizing her since she was sixteen, and somehow, God help me, I turned the pages faster because of it, not despite it.

What actually works, and what made me put the book down and stare at a wall

Look, the pacing is genuinely good. Carlton knows how to end a chapter on a hook that makes “just one more” a lie you tell yourself at 1am. The banter between Zade and Adeline has real snap to it, she gives as good as she gets, and there’s a scene involving Zade cataloguing exactly how long he’s been obsessed with her that is genuinely unsettling in a way that’s clearly intentional and well executed. When the book wants to be creepy, it’s very good at creepy.

The greenhouse scene. I won’t spoil what happens there but if you’ve read it, you know, and if you haven’t, just know it’s the moment the book fully commits to what it is instead of hedging.

Now the criticism, because I promised myself I’d actually say it. The violence and dubious consent in this book are not subtext, they are the whole architecture, and the narrative rarely asks Adeline (or the reader) to sit with the horror of that for longer than a page before swinging back into swoony territory. I don’t think that’s automatically a flaw in dark romance as a genre, that’s the genre doing its job, but Hunting Adeline pushes further than most books that get shelved next to it, and the prose sometimes doesn’t have the control to match the content. There are lines that are trying so hard to be shocking they land closer to unintentionally funny. And the “is he actually a good guy underneath” argument the book makes for Zade is thinner than it thinks it is. It’s not earned so much as declared.

I also think, and I say this as someone who devoured it, that the sequel-bait ending undercuts the emotional stakes it spent the whole book building.

Am I sure I’m rating this fairly? Genuinely not certain. I read this at 2am after a breakup, which is possibly the worst possible headspace for evaluating a book about a man who will not let a woman leave him, and I liked it anyway, which tells you something about either the book’s hooks or my judgment that week. Possibly both.

This is a book that dares you to enjoy the thing you know you shouldn’t, and then doesn’t let you off easy for saying yes.

About HD Carlton

HD Carlton writes the kind of dark romance that makes your book club chat go silent for a second before everyone starts typing at once. She built a massive following largely through TikTok and word of mouth rather than traditional publishing machinery, which tells you something about how hungry readers were for exactly this flavor of unhinged. She doesn’t flinch, doesn’t soften, and clearly does not care if you think her books are “too much.” That confidence is either the best or worst thing about her work depending on the day you ask me.

If this wrecked you (or wrecked your faith in humanity), read these next

Haunting Adeline, obviously, since you cannot start here. If you want the trope done with slightly more restraint, try Verity by Colleen Hoover for psychological menace without the full stalker romance angle. If you want the obsessive-love-interest thing but with a different flavor of dread, Butcher and Blackbird by Brynne Weaver leans into dark humor alongside the darkness. And if you want to test whether you actually like this subgenre or just this book, pick up Corrupt by Penelope Douglas, an earlier, arguably more disciplined example of the morally bankrupt love interest done well.

For your book club

1. Does Zade’s backstory actually justify his behavior toward Adeline, or does the book just want you to believe it does?
2. Adeline is written as sharp and self-aware. Does that characterization make her attraction to Zade more believable, or does it make the book’s choices harder to excuse?
3. Where’s the line between a book depicting something disturbing and a book endorsing it? Does Hunting Adeline stay on the right side of that line for you?
4. Why do you think this specific trope, the stalker who becomes the love interest, has exploded in popularity right now?
5. If you’d read this without knowing the hype, would your reaction have been different?