Hunting Adeline Book 2 of 2: Cat & Mouse Duet

As much as I enjoyed Haunting Adeline, I had to endure the second part of this duology. And I mean that quite literally. It starts with one of the dumbest oversights in the entire plot: Zade — the supposedly unstoppable hacker-genius with endless resources — somehow forgets to keep tabs on Adeline’s parents. Really? That’s how she gets taken? What follows is the darkest, most disturbing stretch of writing I’ve read in a long time. And not in a story-driven, artful way — more like trauma porn with a plot hanging on by a thread. Yes, it’s intense. Yes, it’s raw. But somewhere along the line, the brutality drowned everything else out. Yes, the plot still had me turning pages — I wanted resolution. I wanted out. H. D. Carlton does an impressive job of making Adeline’s trauma feel real — disturbingly so. But as the story shifts from survival to aftermath, everything slowly starts to lose its taste. The romance no longer feels seductive. The tension no longer pulls you forward. Even the spice starts to feel hollow. The emotional recovery feels thin, like something the characters were rushed through. The pacing skips over pain instead of working through it. And the ending tries to land a resolution that, for me, didn’t feel earned. That said, credit where it’s due: H. D. Carlton never romanticizes the trauma. Adeline’s suffering is brutal, unfiltered — and her descent into cold, calculated violence? That landed. It offered a kind of catharsis I didn’t expect but absolutely needed. Watching her burn the world down was, for a while, deeply satisfying. But Zade? Zade doesn’t evolve with her. His obsessive, overstepping nature — which might have been seductive in book one — becomes suffocating in book two. His version of love leaves no space for recovery. And that might be the greatest disappointment. This could’ve been something brutal and redemptive, raw and unforgettable. Instead, it pushed me away — and once it did, all I could see were the flaws.