Haunting Adeline

I went in pretty blind for this one. All I needed to know was that it was banned on Amazon, a heavy dark romance with some big trigger warnings, and my bookish friend Chelsea was all over it. Her recommendations are gospel to me. BUT ON TO THE BOOK.

Oh we've got us a dark one here, baby. I'm going to go ahead and give you the TW's I think apply to it now and you can choose if you want to keep going. So we've got murder, dub/cnc, stalking, torture, human trafficking, primal kink....I'm sure I'm missing something but I think you get it. In less exciting news it's a slow burn and ends on a cliffhanger lol.

If you're still here... I am a sucker for self aware, reckless women...which Addie is. She is an author who just inherited her grandmother's family home. She finds her GREAT grandmother's diary and finds out that her sometimes history does repeat itself.
Zade...I don't even know what to say about him other than he's a walking red flag AND I WANT TO WAVE IT. He takes one look at Addie at one of her book signings and that's that. The obsession begins. He will have her, forever, and she has no say in the matter.

I've yet again read a book that's hard to review without giving away spoilers but there are other things at play besides Z stalking Addie which I think make the book better because I personally don't want 600 pages of just that. Other things are definitely at play and I can't wait for book 2 to see how this all ends.

Zade had the whole ‘I am very bad ass' thing that made me cringe, the way he talked himself up was unattractive to me. I also detested the way he became obsessed with Addie, he saw a photo of her out front of her book signing and immediately stopped in his tracks and declared her as something special and not like anyone else. Really? I couldn't help but roll my eyes. I also found the double standards he set for himself laughable, he goes after paedophiles and men that hurt women, he finds them despicable and has no qualms getting rid of them but it's perfectly fine for him to torment Addie?

Addie was also an annoying character, she had absolutely no self preservation skills, and was definitely not as concerned about her psycho stalker as she should have been.

I feel like a lot of the character flaws could be chalked up to bad writing, the dialogue was so overly dramatic and formal at times, it was a little ridiculous.

I must admit that I did enjoy them together somewhat, regardless of their flaws, but I lost interest with Zade and Addie and was finding the book difficult to finish. Truthfully I found myself more invested in Gigi's story.