Haunting Adeline (Cat and Mouse Duet)

“I’ve chased you across time and space, and you’ve never been able to get away.”
For Adeline Reilly, moving back to Seattle was supposed to be the perfect fresh start. With her flourishing career as an author, and the inheritance of her late grandmother’s gothic mansion, there is nothing to stand in her way.
But Adeline isn’t alone in Parson’s Manor.
It isn’t the angry souls haunting the hallways of her childhood home that Adeline fears–it’s the mysterious break-ins, roses appearing, and threatening messages that somehow sound more like eerie promises.
Adeline has a stalker.
Yet, she quickly discovers she’s not the first person in her family to fall victim to a shadow in pursuit.
Left behind are her great-grandmother’s haunting journals detailing the story of her own phantom, and subsequently, her brutal murder.
Parson’s Manor now holds more than just Adeline’s memories—it houses a grim future that could lead to history repeating itself.
If she doesn’t fall in love with her stalker first.


Warning: This book ends on a cliffhanger. Please visit the author's website for content warnings.

Recommended Reading Order for the C&M Universe:
Satan's Affair
Haunting Adeline
Hunting Adeline
Where's Molly

H. D. Carlton is a New York Times, USA Today, and internationally bestselling author. Her books have been translated into 25 languages with over 12 million copies sold worldwide. She lives in Oregon with her husband, two dogs, cat, and Bigfoot. When she’s not bathing in the tears of her readers, she’s watching paranormal shows and wishing she was a mermaid. Her favorite characters are of the morally gray variety and believes that everyone should check their sanity at the door before diving into her stories.

H.D. Carlton’s dark romance novel, "Haunting Adeline," blends elements of psychological thriller, gothic mystery, and extreme romantic suspense. The story follows twenty-six-year-old Adeline Reilly, a successful author who has recently inherited a sprawling, gothic estate in Washington state known as Parsons Manor. The house belonged to her late grandmother, and Adeline moves in seeking isolation and inspiration for her next book. However, the manor is steeped in an eerie, unsettling atmosphere. Almost as soon as she arrives, Adeline begins to feel as though she is constantly being watched. Her suspicions are confirmed when she starts finding perfectly preserved roses left inside her locked home and catches glimpses of a shadowy, masked figure lurking on her property.

The man watching her is Zade Meadows, the novel's dark anti-hero. Zade becomes instantly and intensely obsessed with Adeline after seeing her at the manor. He begins a relentless campaign of stalking, breaking into her house, watching her sleep, and leaving subtle clues of his presence to let her know she is never truly alone. Instead of immediately fleeing the estate, Adeline finds herself trapped in a complex web of terror and inexplicable fascination. She is deeply afraid of her masked stalker, whom she dubs "The Manipulator," but she also struggles with a dark, awakening desire that his dangerous, overwhelming presence provokes within her. Zade is highly possessive, controlling, and determined to strip away Adeline's defenses, forcing her to confront the darker aspects of her own psychology.

While Zade plays the role of a terrifying stalker in Adeline's life, the novel reveals that he leads a dual existence. Outside of his obsession with Adeline, Zade is a highly skilled hacker and a lethal vigilante who runs a covert, underground organization. His life's mission is to hunt down, torture, and execute individuals involved in pedophilia and high-level human trafficking rings. The author uses this secondary plot to frame Zade as a morally grey character—a monster who hunts worse monsters. He justifies his actions toward Adeline through his twisted sense of morality, believing that because he protects the innocent in his vigilante work, he is somehow entitled to claim Adeline for himself, regardless of boundaries or the law.

Woven alongside the primary stalker narrative is a historical mystery that Adeline discovers hidden within the walls of Parsons Manor. She finds the secret diary of her great-grandmother, Gigi, who lived in the house decades earlier. As Adeline reads the journal entries, she realizes with growing horror that Gigi’s life chillingly mirrors her own. Gigi was also the target of a relentless, obsessive stalker. The diary reveals that Gigi was ultimately murdered in the manor, a crime that was never solved and was quietly swept under the rug by the family. Driven by a need for answers and a deep sense of connection to her ancestor, Adeline takes it upon herself to investigate this cold case, trying to piece together the clues Gigi left behind.

As Adeline delves deeper into Gigi’s murder, her present-day reality with Zade becomes increasingly consuming. Zade’s tactics escalate from watching from the shadows to direct, physical confrontations. He manipulates her environment and her mind, breaking down her resistance until he becomes an unavoidable, dominant force in her daily life. The boundary between predator and protector blurs as Zade makes it clear that while he will ruthlessly control her, he will also violently destroy anyone else who attempts to cause her harm. Adeline's internal conflict reaches its peak as she wrestles with her own autonomy, realizing that she is falling for her tormentor.

The historical mystery culminates when Adeline finally pieces together the tragic truth about her great-grandmother. She discovers that Gigi’s murderer was someone intimately close to her, driven by a toxic, consuming obsession that closely parallels the dynamic playing out between Adeline and Zade. Solving the mystery brings a sense of closure to the past, but it also serves as a stark warning to Adeline about the dangerous, unpredictable nature of obsessive love and the lethal consequences it can harbor.

Just as Adeline begins to fully surrender to her dark romance with Zade, accepting him and the twisted life he brings, the external threats of Zade’s vigilante world crash violently into their isolated bubble. The powerful, elite human trafficking syndicate that Zade has been aggressively dismantling discovers his one weakness: Adeline. In the novel's gripping and devastating climax, the traffickers infiltrate the manor while Zade is away. Despite his obsessive security measures, they manage to kidnap Adeline, intending to use her as leverage and sell her into the very nightmare Zade has sworn to destroy. The book ends on a massive, agonizing cliffhanger, with Zade discovering her abduction and unleashing his full, unhinged wrath to get her back, setting the stage for the sequel, "Hunting Adeline."