Some romances open with a meet-cute. “My Dreadful Darling” opens with a decade-old grave and a debt somebody intends to collect, and from the first chapter H.D. Carlton makes it clear this is not going to be a gentle book.
Reverie Adams enrolls at Hollow Canyon University under a name that isn’t really hers, trying to outrun the fact that her father is Lionel D’Amour — the suspected serial killer known to the press as the Locksmith. She thinks a new campus and a new identity will buy her some peace. Instead she collides with Kellan “Dread” Sharpe, an Olympic swimmer whose mother was the Locksmith’s final victim, and who has spent years promising himself that if he ever found Lionel’s daughter, she would not get to simply move on. What follows is less a courtship than a siege: Kellan sets out to make Reverie suffer for a crime she didn’t commit, and the psychological war between them curdles, as these things do in Carlton’s books, into something neither of them can call hatred anymore.
Carlton has built her career on exactly this kind of pressure-cooker dynamic, and “My Dreadful Darling” is her working at full intensity. The book leans hard into enemies-to-lovers and bully-romance tropes, with a mystery plot — who the Locksmith really was, and what Reverie’s family is still hiding — braided through the obsession at the story’s center. At more than 500 pages, it’s a long book, but reviewers have consistently noted that it doesn’t read like one; Carlton’s pacing and her ear for a cliffhanger keep the chapters turning over quickly. This is the first half of the Hollow Graves duet, and it ends without resolving the central conflict, so readers should go in knowing they’re committing to two books, not one.
Reception has been enthusiastic within Carlton’s existing readership and more divided outside it. Fans of her earlier “Haunting Adeline” series have largely welcomed the return to the same dark, obsessive register, praising the tension between Reverie and Kellan and the way Carlton keeps revealing new layers of the Locksmith mystery. Critics of the book point to familiar complaints about the genre’s extremes: a central relationship built on cruelty before anything softer is allowed in, and pacing that occasionally sacrifices character logic for shock value. It’s an explicit book — dark romance readers will know what “5/5 spice” signals, and that’s very much the audience it’s written for.
“My Dreadful Darling” isn’t trying to convert anyone who doesn’t already like dark romance’s bleaker corners, and it doesn’t need to. For readers who came for the obsessive-love, revenge-plot version of this genre, Carlton delivers it with real craft and momentum, cliffhanger and all. Just don’t start it expecting closure — that’s what book two is for.
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