The Hollow Graves Duet Is Finished

There’s no blurb for book two. There rarely is, with H. D. Carlton. The Hollow Graves Duet is finished, and that’s most of what anyone knows going in.

Carlton closed the duet this week. My Darling Reverie, book two, went up on August 27. Book one, My Dreadful Darling, dropped in April and ended the way her books tend to, mid-crisis, with nothing settled. There’s no official description for book two, the retailer pages just carry the series line, so everyone going in is going in genuinely blind. For this author that’s close to the point.

Here is what book one set up, spoiler free. Reverie Adams is trying to get through college with a serial killer’s blood in her veins and his reputation following her around. Dreadful Sharpe is a swimmer on an Olympic track who wants one thing, and it isn’t a medal. He wants revenge on the family that killed his mother, and he has decided Reverie is how he gets it. The book spends its length making both of them pay for that decision, and then it stops, because there was always going to be a second half.

I haven’t read My Darling Reverie yet, so I’m not rating it. What I can give you is the pattern. Haunting Adeline and Hunting Adeline both sit at a five on the spice scale on this blog, and the darkness in that duet was the exact reason readers either loved it or hurled it across a room. If Hollow Graves holds to form, book two will be explicit, it will be cruel in places, and it will not hold your hand about consent.

So the forecast is a five on heat and a book that means it. The real numbers come after I’ve read it, and I will report back.

If you’ve already finished it, please don’t spoil me. Just tell me whether it stuck the landing.

Bloodthorn · suvienur.com