If you’re looking for spice, ‘Haunting Adeline’ has it in spades

Like gender, spice is a spectrum. There’s the “oh this tickles” Tabasco that you put on your eggs in the morning, and then there’s the Carolina Reaper pepper “dear god it burns” kinda hot. BookTok fav Haunting Adeline is on the latter end, so if you’re … curious, these are the spicy chapters.

First off, what is Haunting Adeline about?

H.D. Carlton’s Haunting Adeline is what people in the literary biz like to call a “dark romance.” That means it’s for the people who are into the freaky stuff, which is, let’s be honest, lots of people. Haunting Adeline is a trigger warning between two hard covers. Sexual assault, noncon, sex trafficking, this book goes there. Read at your own risk.

As for the plot, the book centers around the titular Adeline, a young woman who has recently come into possession of her dead grandma’s house. The house is already creepy and death-haunted enough, and the spooky dial is turned up to 11 when Adeline realizes that she’s being haunted by a deranged stalker who is totally obsessed with her. While Adeline is freaked at first, she soon finds herself drawn to how into her the boundary-vaulting Zade is. Eventually, the pair become tangled in a twisted tryst.

So where’s the spice?

The spicy chapters in Haunting Adeline are 8, 16, 18, 21, 22, 23, 25, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 38, 40 and 41. That’s A LOT of spice. How is Adeline ever going to get busy solving her grandma’s murder when she’s getting busy in all the other ways? Spoiler alert: She doesn’t. Well, not everything. The first book ends on a cliffhanger, and the second novel, Hunting Adeline, ties up all the loose ends. No pun intended.