Sigh… I have to learn not to give into booktok hype. 

This was a hard read . This feels like something I would enjoy 10 years ago if I were still obsessed with Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey. But this was just cringey to read. Zade reads as a creepy toxic guy with an inflated ego and Adeline is unnecessarily horny and naive. And I don't know how to feel.

Contrary to other reviewers, I'm not opposed to noncon/dubcon as I've seen it executed well in novels with complicated characters. This is not the case. Zade's character is shallow and written horribly. He never explains why he is so obsessed with Adeline in the first place, let alone to the point that he would kill for (and to spite) her. He just taunts her with the idea that he is her stalker and can have her anytime.  It felt like abuse marketed as kink with quotable “spice” for TikTok .

The gun rape is still burned in my brain unfortunately

The plot was not much better. The murder mystery around Adeline’s great grandmother was pointless and disappointing. But the pedophile ring plot truly irked me. I strongly believe that if a book is going to center sexual abuse/child abuse, it should have the nuance and sensitivity needed to discuss it. This just felt like the book needed some way to redeem Zade for his torment of Adeline and putting “pedophile-killer” in his backstory was the way to do it. Everything about it was so 2-dimensional and Disney-villainish I can’t. There are so many times Zade says something along the lines of  “I won’t rest until every pedophile is dead”, like he’s some Ex-Machina war assassin , and then in the same breathe kills/decapacitates anyone who even breathes in Adeline’s direction. It’s giving - “I don’t really care too much about innocent kids as much as I like to kill for the sake of it”. 

This book in my eyes isn’t “bad” in the sense of the writing is bad (the writing is definitely descriptive and keeps the story going), but the story and the characters are just juvenile and unlikeable. I probably would’ve been more interested if *author-mode* Adeline's stalker was actually a ghost "haunting" her to get her to solve the mystery of her great-grandmother's murder and then-surprise surprise ended up falling dangerously in love with her. What a much better story that could've been. *Sigh*.


**Additional Spoilers**

Side note : The book has a dual POV-switch between Zade and Adeline. Zade is nicknamed "The Shadow" and Adeline is nicknamed "The Manipulator". I have no idea why Adeline is named “The Manipulator” . She does absolutely no such thing. There’s a brief mention that she “manipulates” people with her words because she’s an author but if that’s the reason she's a "The Manipulator" that is such a laughable reach considering we don’t even see her write/do much of that in this book. Again another example of marketing fluff for TikTok