Rating: ★★★★★

Genre: Dark Romance, Psychological Thriller, Dark Erotica, Vigilante Romance

Available On: Amazon

If HD Carlton’s Haunting Adeline was a plunge into obsession, Hunting Adeline is the deep, unflinching dive into the aftermath. It’s brutal, bold, and brilliant, taking everything that made the first book so conflictingly compelling and holding a mirror up to it, shattering any comfortable illusions you may have tried to maintain about what you were reading.

This is the second book in H.D. Carlton’s Cat and Mouse Duet, and no, this is not the place to start if you haven’t already read book one. Hunting Adeline picks up directly after that cliffhanger and throws you straight into the consequences. The obsession is still there. The darkness is still there. But this time, the story is less about the thrill of being hunted and more about survival, trauma, revenge, and what it actually costs to come back from something horrific.

So, What Is Hunting Adeline Actually About?

Hunting Adeline follows Adeline after she is kidnapped by the trafficking ring Zade has been trying to destroy. While Adeline is trapped in a brutal, dehumanising nightmare, Zade is fighting to find her, recover from his own injuries, and dismantle the people responsible.

It is darker than the first book. Much darker. The romance is still there, but it is buried under trauma, violence, obsession, vengeance, and recovery. This isn’t a cosy “morally grey man saves the day” sequel. It is pitch black, deeply uncomfortable, and far more focused on what happens after fantasy collides with real horror.

Wait, Is Hunting Adeline Book One Or Book Two?

Book two. Hunting Adeline is the sequel to Haunting Adeline, and yes the titles are so close it’s very confusing, and yes you really do need to read the first book before this one.

If you’re looking for the full series context, I’ve covered the Cat and Mouse Duet as their own phenomenon separately. Here, I’m specifically looking to rant about Hunting Adeline and why it completely changed the way I felt about the first book.

Hunting Adeline Synopsis (Yes, There Are Spoilers, It’s A Synopsis)

If you don’t want spoilers skip this section!

Hunting Adeline begins exactly where the first book leaves off: Zade has been caught in an explosion while infiltrating the trafficking organisation he has been hunting, while Adeline has been taken by the same network. Separated from him, she is dragged into a house where women are groomed, broken, and prepared for powerful men who treat them as objects to be bought, used, and discarded.

The first part of the book follows Adeline’s captivity. She is stripped of control, subjected to horrific abuse, and forced to survive a system designed to destroy her sense of self. The violence is graphic and relentless, but the point is not simply shock. Carlton uses this section to show the difference between the dark fantasy of being hunted and the reality of being trapped, trafficked, and brutalised by people who see her as property.

While Adeline is trying to stay alive, Zade is trying to find her. Injured, furious, and spiralling, he hunts through the trafficking network for any trace of where she has been taken. His obsession becomes less about possession and more about vengeance. Every piece of information brings him closer to Adeline, but also deeper into the machinery of the Society, the powerful organisation behind the abuse.

When Zade finally reaches her, the rescue is bloody, violent, and cathartic, largely because Adeline goes a long way towards saving herself, and doesn’t simply sit demurely waiting to be rescued. Despite eventually being found and reunited with Zade, it does not magically fix anything. 

The second half of the novel shifts into the aftermath. Adeline is no longer physically trapped, but the trauma follows her home. She struggles with fear, shame, rage, intimacy, and the horrifying disconnect between being saved and actually feeling safe.

From there, Hunting Adeline becomes a revenge story as much as a romance. Zade and Adeline begin turning their attention back toward the people responsible, but the emotional heart of the book is Adeline’s recovery. She has to rebuild herself after being reduced to survival, while Zade has to learn how to love her through the damage without trying to control the shape of her healing.

By the end, the book has moved from abduction and rescue into something darker and more complicated: survival, retaliation, trauma, and the slow reclamation of power. 

It doesn’t erase the moral problems of the first book. But it does drag them into harsher light. 

That is what makes Hunting Adeline so brutal, and why it changes the way the entire duet reads.

My Review Of Hunting Adeline

Hunting Adeline picks up immediately after the cliffhanger H.D. Carlton inflicted on us at the end of book one. Major spoiler warning here, obviously. Stop reading if you haven’t finished the first book.

Zade has just been blown up while infiltrating the sex trafficking ring he’s been trying to dismantle, and Adeline has been kidnapped by that very ring. Her best friend’s life hangs in the balance. The stakes? So much higher. The content? So much darker.

The rescue, when it comes, is brutal and bloody.

And the aftermath? Unrelentingly real despite being unapologetically melodramatic.

The first part is genuinely hard to read. Adeline is kidnapped, raped, tortured, trafficked, and broken down in ways that are deliberately, horrifyingly graphic. This is not a vague off-page trauma backstory. Carlton puts the reader inside Adeline’s terror, dissociation, rage, and survival.

Meanwhile, Zade is trying to find her. He is injured, furious, obsessive, and absolutely unleashed. His mission to destroy the trafficking ring becomes inseparable from his need to find Adeline, and by the time he does, the book has dragged both characters into a far darker emotional place than the first book ever reached.

What follows is not a neat rescue fantasy. Adeline does not simply get saved and become fine. Hunting Adeline gives her space to be traumatised, furious, numb, afraid, sexual, non-sexual, powerful, broken, and healing in ways that are not always linear or comfortable.

That is where the book becomes more than just shock value. It becomes a story about what survival actually looks like when the thing you survived refuses to leave your body.

How Hunting Adeline Reframes The First Book

I’ll be honest: I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the first half of this duet. I didn’t expect to find myself pulled so completely into the DARK dark romance world. The first book challenged me, especially with the thorny issue of consent, but it also left me breathless.

Still, I couldn’t quite bring myself to give it five stars. There was a niggling discomfort in the back of my mind, a sense that something about the dynamic between Zade and Adeline crossed a line, even as the narrative danced around the idea that maybe, just maybe, Adeline was into it all along.

And then came Hunting Adeline.

And suddenly, everything changed.

Consent, Reframed: It’s A Razor-Edge Distinction

What kept the first book from being a five-star read for me was the uncomfortable grey area around Zade’s behaviour. He stalked her. He raped her. And while the narrative made a case for her deriving sexual thrill from fear, suggesting perhaps she was non-verbally consenting while screaming “no”, it was still problematic as hell.

But Hunting Adeline obliterates the ambiguity.

Because in this book, Adeline is kidnapped. She is raped. She is tortured. She is not aroused. She is not complicit. The distinction is visceral. It’s horrifying, graphic, and not for the faint of heart.

Reading this book was like being repeatedly punched in the gut, and I mean that as a compliment. It’s not just dark. It’s pitch black. And it’s in this harrowing landscape that we finally understand the depth of what Zade never did to her.

There’s no “maybe” here. We see what actual rape and torture look like, and suddenly Zade’s actions in book one, while still wildly inappropriate and morally wrong, exist in a different universe.

That doesn’t mean they’re excused.

But they are contextualised.

Psychological Trauma and Slow Recovery

This isn’t a romance with quick fixes and neat bows. Adeline is a broken woman, and the novel gives her space to be just that. Her recovery is slow. Painful. Complicated. And Zade, disturbingly obsessive Zade, becomes both the safest and most dangerous person in her orbit.

Their chemistry remains, but it’s different now. It’s tempered by trauma, laced with PTSD, and constantly threatening to implode. And yet, it’s real. There’s a harrowing beauty to watching Adeline slowly reclaim her power, not through blind forgiveness, but through agency. 

Through choice.

Zade: The Vigilante Monster With A God Complex

In Hunting Adeline, Zade becomes something more than a morally grey anti-hero. He’s a dark god of vengeance, a vigilante unbound by law or mercy. We get deeper into his backstory, his motives, his trauma, and it makes his behaviour marginally more understandable, if not forgivable.

He remains a paradox: terrifying yet tender, manipulative yet reverent. He will never be “safe”, and that’s the point.

He doesn’t want to be.

Sibby: From Plot Device To Scene-Stealer

When Sibby first appeared, she felt like little more than a human chainsaw with a Barbie complex, equal parts comedic relief and convenient murder scapegoat. Her role was memorable, yes, but largely peripheral. I knew there was a prequel novella about her, Satan’s Affair, but if I’m honest, I didn’t rush to read it.

At the time, she struck me as more of a quirky plot device than a character worth diving into.

And then came Hunting Adeline.

Sibby is back, and this time, she’s bringing the chaos. Her return injects a wild, unpredictable energy into a story otherwise saturated in trauma and darkness. She flits into scenes like a manic pixie dream assassin, trailing blood, glitter, and make-believe henchmen.

Her delusions, if that’s even what they are, add a surreal layer to the world Carlton has built, one where ghosts are just casually accepted as real. One of the most disturbing things about Sibby is the question of whether her henchmen actually are entirely figments of her imagination, or whether there’s some kind of otherworldly truth to them.

That’s also a question lingering over her ability to ‘smell’ demons. Is this just a delusion, or does she actually have some kind of sixth sense that allows her to recognise the level of evil in a person’s soul? A power that manifests in the way they smell to her?

But beneath her demented dollhouse exterior lies something far more intriguing: heart. 

Sibby is all depth and pain.

For all her erratic energy and darkly hilarious one-liners, she becomes a source of unexpected warmth in Hunting Adeline. She’s loyal. She’s fearless. And in her own deranged way, she gets Adeline. There’s a sisterhood that forms, unconventional, unspoken, but weirdly powerful.

It’s clear that Sibby’s madness masks a deep wound, and suddenly, I found myself caring far more about her than I ever anticipated.

Who Is Kraven In Hunting Adeline?

SPOILER ALERT

The arrival of Kraven absolutely floored me. Who is this absurdly attractive enigma who sparks an instant and clearly dangerous gut reaction in Adeline? Why does he know Sibby? What’s with his name, and why does it sound like he is one of her imaginary henchmen, except disturbingly real and possibly just as unhinged?

As if that wasn’t enough, Sibby abruptly absconds with him and even Zade can’t find them. What the hell is going on?

Carlton drops this mystery with zero resolution, which would be infuriating if it wasn’t so delicious. He’s a product of the psychiatric facility where Sibby was detained between the events of the first book and Hunting Adeline, and yes, Satan’s Affair suddenly feels a lot less optional than I originally thought.

So… guess who’s now reading the book she thought she’d skip?

Where Hunting Adeline Leaves The Wider H.D. Carlton Rabbit Hole

One of the things Hunting Adeline does well is make the surrounding world feel bigger without turning the book into a full series guide. Sibby, Kraven, the references to Where’s Molly, and the looming promise of Phantom all make this feel like one blood-soaked corner of a much larger gothic rabbit hole.

And yes, I am absolutely diving in.

Is it ridiculously contrived that Adeline would randomly find yet another mysterious diary to act as an anchor for her? 

Yes, absolutely. 

Do I care?

No. 

I’m going to buy the other damn book.

Carlton is also working on another duet featuring Sibby and (presumably?) Kraven as the POV characters, and man am I desperate for that to appear.

Themes: Revenge, Redemption, And The Duality Of Desire

Carlton doesn’t shy away from the darkest human impulses. This is a book about revenge. Savage, brutal revenge, and how it intertwines with love, trauma, and lust.

It explores survival, not as a victory, but as a daily battle. 

It interrogates the line between desire and destruction. 

And it doesn’t flinch from the messiness of recovery, the rage of victims, or the uncomfortable fact that sometimes, the monsters we fear are also the ones who save us.

The Genre Problem: Dark Romance, Thriller, Trauma, Chaos

Hunting Adeline is dark romance, but it also leans heavily into psychological thriller, dark erotica, vigilante revenge, trauma survival, and horror-adjacent territory.

This is not ‘dark romance’ in the cute morally-grey-man-with-a-smirk sense (if you want that I highly recommend Navessa Allen’s Into Darkness series). Some dark romances are comfortable. Others push boundaries. 

Hunting Adeline is violent, explicit, disturbing, and deliberately difficult to stomach. 

The romance is still central, but the book is just as invested in survival, vengeance, obsession, and the aftermath of sexual violence.

So yes, it’s a romance.

But it is also a descent.

The Spice? Still Unhinged.

Spice Rating: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ (5/5)

Let’s be clear: this book is filthy. The sex scenes are just as explicit, over-the-top, and, yes, occasionally ridiculous as they were in the first book. Some of the dirty talk had me physically cringing and laughing out loud in the middle of otherwise intense scenes.

At this point, it’s part of the charm. You’re not reading for realism. You’re reading for chaos.

And Carlton delivers.

Trigger Warnings: Seriously, Take These Seriously

The trigger warnings for this book are not to be sniffed at. It contains graphic scenes of rape, torture, human trafficking, abuse, and PTSD. There’s no way around it: Hunting Adeline is not safe. It is not sanitised. It doesn’t pull its punches.

If you’ve experienced trauma, this could be deeply triggering.

But for those who can stomach it, there’s value in the unflinching honesty of the depiction. I know a lot of people rightly shy away from material like this and view it as actively damaging. As someone who has experienced things on a similar spectrum (though by no means scale!) in real life, there is something deeply cathartic about reading about the type of trauma you experienced in a safe, fictional form. About watching a character survive it, and in this case wreak bloody vengeance on those who hurt you. 

Regardless, I would advise anyone to approach this (and all dark romance) with caution. Check the trigger warnings, read with caution and self-care. 

Romance Tropes In Hunting Adeline

Trope Count: 🖤🗡💥🧨🔥🩹👹

From obsession to vengeance, Hunting Adeline delivers a buffet of dark romance tropes, each more intense, twisted, and emotionally charged than the last. Honestly, I may need to update my running list of romance tropes, because I don’t think most, if any, of these even made the cut.

Dark Protector

Unlike the first book, where Zade’s ‘protection’ often blurred dangerously into predation, Hunting Adeline flips the script.

This time, the threat is real, external, and devastating. Zade becomes the one person Adeline can rely on in a world that’s systematically breaking her. His protectiveness no longer feels like obsession masquerading as care. It feels needed, and viscerally effective.

He’s still dangerous. Still obsessive. Still utterly unforgivable for some of the things he’s done. But now, his violence is pointed outward.

Revenge Romance

Zade’s rage is incandescent. The atrocities committed against Adeline are not brushed aside or romanticised. They’re met with brutal vengeance.

This is not justice with a badge. 

It’s scorched earth.

His retaliation against those who hurt her is graphic, horrifying, and weirdly satisfying. In a genre that often shies away from consequences, Hunting Adeline leans into retribution with full force.

Trauma Bonding

Adeline and Zade’s connection has always been based on extreme emotional intensity, but here, it’s forged in fire. Their shared trauma, and the deep scars each carries, create a bond that’s both healing and harrowing.

This isn’t romance built on flowers and cosy dates. It’s forged through pain, survival, and a near-animalistic need to cling to something, anything, familiar.

Redemption Arc

Zade’s redemption is a central question. He doesn’t apologise in the conventional sense. He doesn’t change who he is. But he does shift how he channels that darkness.

He becomes a tool for Adeline’s healing and a weapon against her abusers. Whether that redeems him depends entirely on your moral compass. But one thing is certain: he tries.

And that effort gives their story a new kind of emotional gravity.

Possessive Obsession

If Zade was obsessed in book one, he’s absolutely unhinged in Hunting Adeline. But it reads differently now.

His fixation isn’t just lust. It’s devotion laced with desperation. His entire world revolves around Adeline, and while that should be terrifying, and still is in moments, it also forms the backbone of the book’s emotional intensity.

Possessiveness here isn’t framed as cute. It’s raw, primal, and disturbingly moving.

Healing Through Love

There’s no magical fix. Adeline’s trauma is immense, and her journey toward healing is slow, jagged, and real.

But love, particularly the messy, all-consuming kind Zade offers, becomes part of her recovery. Not a replacement for therapy. Not a cure. But a salve. A companion to the harder work.

Their love is not soft.

But it is honest.

And that, somehow, is enough.

Beauty And The Beast Energy

Zade is the beast, and he owns it. There’s no pretense here. He knows what he is, and so does Adeline.

The attraction doesn’t come from a hidden softness but from the vulnerability he shows in spite of his monstrous nature. This is a tale where the beauty isn’t trying to tame the beast.

She’s learning to live with him, fangs and all.

The Verdict On Hunting Adeline

This book broke me.

In the best way.

It’s not a safe read. It’s not a morally tidy read. It’s not even something I can recommend lightly. But for those who found the first book compelling and came away with lingering questions about morality, consent, and the dark edges of human desire, Hunting Adeline is essential reading.

It doesn’t absolve the sins of the first book. But it complicates them. Challenges them. And maybe, just maybe, justifies them within the warped, boundary-pushing world H.D. Carlton has built.

If the first book made you question your morals, Hunting Adeline will help you understand why.