Clara’s Verdict
I am going to be direct about this one before anything else, because Haunting Adeline is not a title I would hand to a listener without a warning attached. H. D. Carlton has written a dark romance built on a stalking premise and she commits to it completely, with none of the softening that usually arrives around the halfway mark to reassure you that everything is fine really. Across thirteen hours and twelve minutes the book earns its reputation, and that reputation cuts in both directions at once.
What surprised me is how much of it is genuinely gothic rather than merely marketed as gothic. Parson’s Manor is a real presence in this audiobook, and the historical strand running underneath the contemporary one gives the whole thing a weight I had not expected. A 4.4 average from more than 172,000 ratings tells you the readership is enormous and largely converted, and the book is sitting high in the Audible UK charts as I write this, some years after an independent release that had no publicity machine behind it at all. That is word of mouth doing exactly what word of mouth does.
About the Audiobook
Adeline Reilly moves back to Seattle expecting a clean start. Her career as an author is going well, and she has inherited her late grandmother’s gothic mansion, so on paper there is nothing standing in her way. The house has other ideas, and so does the person who has begun letting himself into it. Roses appear where they should not be. Messages arrive that read less like threats than like promises. Adeline works out fairly quickly that she has a stalker, and rather more slowly that she is not the first woman in her family to be pursued this way.
The second strand is where the novel gets its shape. Her great-grandmother left behind journals describing her own shadow, and those entries end in a brutal murder. Carlton runs the two timelines against each other so that Adeline is effectively reading a version of her own future, which is a far more interesting structural idea than the premise alone suggests. Whether history repeats is the engine of the book, and it keeps running for the full thirteen hours without the tension going slack. The angry souls in the hallways, incidentally, are the least of anyone’s problems here, which is a neat inversion of what a haunted house novel usually promises.
Two practical points before you press play. First, the book ends on a cliffhanger, and the publisher states as much on the listing rather than leaving you to discover it at hour thirteen. It resolves in Hunting Adeline, the second half of the Cat and Mouse Duet. Second, there is a wider reading order for the Cat and Mouse universe, and it runs Satan’s Affair, then Haunting Adeline, then Hunting Adeline, then Where’s Molly. Satan’s Affair sits first in that sequence, though most listeners arrive at Haunting Adeline and work outwards, which is perfectly workable.
The Narration
Nobody is credited as narrator on this listing, which happens more often than it should with independently published titles that found their readership in print first and moved into audio afterwards. I would treat the sample as essential rather than optional here, and for a specific reason.
This is a demanding book to read aloud. There are two registers to hold apart across thirteen hours, the contemporary first-person narration and the journal entries from a woman writing decades earlier, and they need genuinely different textures or the historical strand loses its power entirely. There is a male antagonist whose dialogue has to sit on an uncomfortable line between menace and appeal, because the whole romance depends on a listener feeling both things simultaneously rather than choosing one. And there is a substantial quantity of explicit content that a reading either commits to or fumbles. A performance that flinches will make this book far worse than it is on the page. A performance that leans too far into breathiness will tip it towards the ridiculous. Listen to a few minutes and work out which way the reading falls before you give it an evening.
What Readers Say
Holding 4.4 across more than 172,000 ratings is remarkable for a novel this divisive, and the reviews explain how both facts are true at the same time. Ruth_Reads1 called it “long, intense, and unapologetically atmospheric and it never once lost my attention”, and then made the point I keep returning to, that “it feels closer to a psychological gothic thriller” than to a romance with dark trimmings around the edges.
It was different to what I was used to reading and is extremely dark and messed up but the characters were what kept me going.
Hayley’s four-star review is the most useful thing I read about this book, because it is admiring and troubled in equal measure. She singles out Gigi, she loved the friendship between Adeline and Daya, and she gave up trying to make sense of the central relationship altogether. Twistedchapter91 came to it because a friend had finished it and needed somebody to talk to about it, which is precisely how this novel travels, and reported afterwards that “I completely understand why she wanted someone else to read it”. The lower ratings making up the rest of that average are, I would guess, objecting to the very things the admirers name as strengths.
Who Should Listen?
This one comes with conditions rather than a straightforward recommendation. If you read dark romance deliberately, understand what the subgenre does with pursuit and consent, and want a version of it carrying real gothic atmosphere and a historical mystery underneath, you will understand the fuss inside the first two hours.
Anyone not already at ease with that subgenre should read the content warnings in full before pressing play. This is a novel about stalking that treats the stalker as a romantic lead, and it contains explicit violence and sexual content that several reviewers found hard going even while admiring the book. There is no version of Haunting Adeline in which a listener is eased in gently, and I would rather say so than let anyone find out the hard way at hour four.
Budget for the sequel as well. Thirteen hours will not give you an ending, the cliffhanger is real, and Hunting Adeline is where the story finishes. With all of that stated plainly, this remains one of the most talked-about audiobooks in Britain at the moment, and if the premise draws you rather than repels you, it delivers what its readership has been promising each other for years.
