What to read after “Haunting Adeline” by H.D. Carlton: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
When her father cannot pay a debt, he sells Roxy to the Vipers, four men who run the city's underworld. Held in their home, she refuses to submit and plots her revenge. The longer she stays, the more the line blurs between captor and lover, and the four men begin to claim her as their own.
A struggling writer is hired to finish the novels of an author who can no longer work. Sorting the family's papers in a remote house, she finds an unfinished memoir describing events too dark to be true, and must decide whom to believe.
Caleb has spent twelve years hunting the mobster who kidnapped him and sold him into slavery. To get close to his target, he abducts eighteen-year-old Olivia and begins training her as a sex slave. Bound and isolated, Olivia fears her captor, but her growing attraction to him makes escape even harder.
Erika has crushed on Michael Crist, her best friend's older brother, for years. After a night that ends in scandal, she joins the same elite university as Michael and his friends, who hold her responsible for a past wrong. Their revenge turns into a dangerous game neither can control.
A woman with no money and a criminal record takes a live-in job cleaning for a wealthy family. The wife is cruel, the husband is kind, and a locked door upstairs keeps drawing her attention as the household's rules grow stranger.
Child psychologist Anna Fox lives alone, unable to leave her home, and spends her days watching her neighbours through a camera. When she sees something in the house across the street, no one believes her, and she is left to work out whether the danger is real or in her mind.
In a quiet suburb, a young mother vanishes while out running, and weeks later another woman and her six-year-old daughter disappear nearby. Eleven years on, the daughter suddenly returns, and what she brings back unsettles everyone who stayed behind.
A woman marries a charming man and finds their perfect home is a prison he controls. As she learns the rules of her new life and fears for her sister, she starts looking for a way out before the arrangement closes around her.
Rae hunts ghosts in the small town of Abelaum, where old occult secrets are stirring. A summoning binds her to Leon, a demon assassin who was ordered to kill her and chose not to. As a cult closes in and monsters wake in the woods, Rae must decide how far she trusts the demon who wants her soul.
In Victorian England, Anna Champion offends the wealthy Christopher Davenport at a ball, and he sets out to ruin her. Using his charm and money, he turns her family's world upside down and brings her into his household. Anna fights back with wit and courage, even as their hatred turns into something more dangerous.
Three men find a crashed plane, a dead pilot and a bag of money in the snow. What starts as a quiet decision to keep the cash spirals into suspicion, lies and violence, as each tries to hold together a plan that keeps changing.
Wendy, the sheltered twenty-year-old daughter of Peter Michaels, walks into James's bar and becomes the pawn in his long campaign of revenge against her father. As James's criminal organization begins to fracture and a traitor emerges, his plan blurs into obsession, and Wendy is drawn to the man known as James and the monster known as Hook.
Ten years after surviving a massacre at a remote cabin in the woods, Quincy has built a quiet life out of pills, baking and careful routine. When another survivor from that group of women dies and a third turns up at her door, the past she cannot fully remember starts to close in again.
On their fifth wedding anniversary, Amy Dunne disappears from a rented house and her husband Nick becomes the prime suspect. Two narrators tell very different versions of the same marriage.
Through letters to her estranged husband, Eva looks back on the life of their son Kevin and on the years she struggled to feel any bond with him. She tries to understand the person he became, and to face her own part in what happened.
A husband and wife in a Florida suburb look like an ordinary couple, but they share a secret pastime that has to stay hidden. As the double life grows harder to manage, the narrator finds the person he knows best is the one he trusts least.
On a night flight from London to Boston, Ted tells a stranger that he wishes his cheating wife were dead. Lily calmly offers to help him plan it. As their murder scheme takes shape in Boston, each of the narrators hides a past the others know nothing about.
Years after her mother and sisters were killed and her teenage brother was convicted, Libby Day is approached by a group of true-crime enthusiasts who believe he is innocent. Short of money, she agrees to ask questions, and the answers force her to revisit what she remembers of that night.
An ambitious woman works her way into the life of a rich, seemingly perfect couple, planning to take the wife's place. The household she longs to join has secrets of its own, and neither woman is quite what she pretends to be.
As a child she helped put her father away for killing girls. Twenty years later she is a therapist about to marry, when young women in her town begin to disappear again and the old case follows her into the present.
Elena is the favoured, docile daughter of a mafia boss, expected to keep the family's reputation spotless. When her sister is arranged to marry Nicolas Russo, a feared Made Man from a rival family, Elena is drawn into his orbit against her better judgment. He is rude, dangerous and always near, and the attraction between them turns a family alliance into a scandal waiting to happen.
A couple leave their sleeping baby at home while they attend a dinner party next door, checking on her every half hour. They return to an empty crib. The police suspect the parents, and both of them start learning what the other has been hiding.
Fourteen-year-old Marjorie Barrett begins to act strangely, and her family turns first to a priest and then to a reality-television crew. Years later her younger sister tells the story of what happened in the house, though her memory is not entirely trustworthy.
Rachel rides the same commuter train every day and invents stories about a couple she sees from the window, until she learns the woman has vanished. Her memory of the night in question is full of gaps, and she cannot tell how much of what she believes is real.
Start with “Den of Vipers”, “Verity”, “Captive in the Dark”: they are the closest to “Haunting Adeline” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “Haunting Adeline” these are Dark Romance, Morally Grey Character, Revenge), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “Den of Vipers”, “Verity”, “Captive in the Dark”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
