I’m gonna be honest with you. I picked this up as an audiobook and I think that really colored a lot of what I disliked about Satan’s Affair by HD Carlton. A friend and I decided we were going to read Haunting Adeline to see what all the hype was about and before we could start, I wanted to read this since that’s the reading order the author recommended. Picked it up as an audiobook to listen to while at work (yes, I live dangerously.) This literally sat at 2 stars until the ending.
Sybil works at a traveling haunted house – how? does she only work for one month a year? what does she do the rest of the year? I know it isn’t that deep, but okay. She has five? henchmen that help her in her mission to kill bad people, whom she can smell because she’s special. Sybil is annoying and the narrator ramps that up to 100. Between murders (which I can’t say were gruesome considering I love reading pretty gory horror and murdermances), there’s just smut. If this were ao3, it’d be pwp and not any that I would really want to read. The appearances of her henchmen are pretty weird and it definitely had me wondering what was happening for most of the novella. Then, we get to where this intersects with Haunting Adeline and things start making sense. There is a killer twist at the end that literally saves the entire thing for me, enough to go from 2 stars to 3.5.
Satan’s Affair by HD Carlton is going to be a book I’d recommend you borrow from a friend rather than buy it yourself, unless you’re a diehard Haunting Adeline/HD Carlton fan. The twist at the end was good enough to salvage the story, but the story itself wasn’t one I needed to read, nor was the smut particularly exhilarating. Definitely don’t get the audiobook.
