Published in 2026, My Dreadful Darling is a dark romance and psychological thriller by New York Times and USA Today best-selling author H. D. Carlton. Known for her popular dark romance novels, Carlton delivers a story that blends intense psychological conflict with romantic suspense. The novel centers on Reverie Adams, a college student trying to escape the sinister legacy of her father, the infamous serial killer Lionel D’Amour, also known as the Locksmith. Her attempt at a normal life is derailed when she is relentlessly tormented by Dreadful “Dread” Sharpe, an Olympic swimmer and the son of one of her father’s victims. As Dread pursues a years-long vow of revenge, their relationship of mutual hatred spirals into a dangerous and all-consuming obsession, which only intensifies when Lionel is released from prison and a new series of threats emerges.

The novel is the first installment in a new series and ends on a significant cliffhanger. Through the complex dynamic between its protagonists, the narrative explores themes such as The Lifelong Impact of Childhood Trauma, as both Reverie and Dread are haunted by their violent pasts. It also examines Obsessive Hatred as a Mask for Desire, exploring how revenge, attraction, and obsession become increasingly intertwined in the evolving relationship between Reverie and Dread. Furthermore, the story critiques The Distorted Nature of Public Perception by showing how a charismatic villain can manipulate public opinion, leaving the true victims isolated and disbelieved. Carlton is a prominent author in the dark romance genre, with a significant following on social media platforms like TikTok, where her novels, including the best-selling The Cat and Mouse Duet series, have gained widespread popularity.

This guide refers to the 2026 first edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of graphic violence, sexual content, sexual violence and harassment, rape, physical abuse, emotional abuse, child abuse, bullying, mental illness, pregnancy loss, suicidal ideation, self-harm, death by suicide, cursing, and death.

Plot Summary

Reverie Adams, born Charlotte D’Amour and now legally renamed after her 18th birthday to escape her father’s shadow, arrives at Hollow Canyon University in Colorado with a single ambition: Survive long enough to become a victimology advocate for children who suffered as she did. Her first memory is of her mother, Regina, holding her underwater in a bathtub when she was four years old—a drowning attempt born of postpartum psychosis after Reverie accidentally caused her pregnant mother to slip on spilt apple juice, losing the baby boy inside her. Reverie’s father, Lionel D’Amour, saved her that night, and for two years he remained her only safe harbor. That safety shattered when Reverie was six and stumbled into his shed to find him dismembering a woman named Georgia Farrell in a full protective suit, surrounded by severed limbs and a boxed collection of trophies—locks of hair from his victims. Lionel forced his daughter to touch the hair, then threatened that if she told anyone, he would kill her mother and make Reverie suffer the same fate. So she stayed silent.

Two years later, Lionel was arrested after an eight-year-old boy named Kellan Sharpe gave eyewitness testimony describing a man with an angel-wing tattoo behind his ear coming to pick up his mother, Katherine Sharpe, for a date. Katherine never came home; her remains were later scattered across a junkyard. Reverie herself had drawn the tattoo—Lionel called her “Angel,” and she had sketched the wings as a loving gift before she understood what he was. The detail convinced a jury to find Lionel guilty of Katherine’s murder, but almost no one else believed Kellan. A copycat killer emerged after Lionel’s imprisonment, performing identical murders in California and seemingly proving that the real Locksmith was still free. The public turned on Kellan, now going by the nickname Dread after his swim coach dubbed him that at age 10. Reverie and her mother gave numerous television interviews proclaiming Lionel’s innocence, and Reverie watched silently as the world destroyed the little boy who had told the truth.

Dread spent years as a prodigious competitive swimmer, breaking Olympic records while nursing a consuming hatred for the D’Amour family. When Reverie enrolled at Hollow Canyon University, Dread—already a two-time Olympic gold medalist and the campus’s celebrated swim captain—followed her there deliberately. He informs her on their very first encounter that he came to keep his promise: to make her wish she were dead. For the next four years he orchestrates escalating torments alongside his two loyal friends, the tattooed, irreverent Rogue Cameron and the quietly intense romance-novel-reading Severen Fox. Their cruelties range from spreading vicious rumors and burning her wardrobe to staging a fake arrest using police costumes, chaining her to a flagpole during a blizzard, filling her dorm room with a mutilated dummy soaked in artificial blood, and—on her 22nd birthday—surrounding her in a forest grave while a dozen girls dressed as Locksmith victims toss dirt on her and speak the names of the dead. Reverie does not remain passive throughout their conflict. She responds to Dread with insults, retaliation, and increasingly elaborate challenges of her own. Their antagonism consequently develops into an escalating pattern in which Dread remains the primary aggressor but Reverie repeatedly refuses to behave as the compliant target he expects.

In January of her senior year, the pressure intensifies from multiple directions at once. FBI Special Agent Barry Jones, who has functioned as Reverie’s surrogate father since her own was imprisoned, calls to tell her that Lionel’s parole board approved his release, effective February 5. Reverie also learns that Lionel has secretly been dating Roxi Jenkins, a fellow HCU senior who is manipulated into believing in his innocence and who may already be pregnant. Aware that Dread will be enraged when he discovers the release, Reverie steals the notification letter from a pile of mail on his nightstand after he rescues her from near-hypothermia and takes her back to his room. She also doses several of his Gatorade bottles with crushed melatonin, causing him to collapse with overwhelming drowsiness at a nationally televised swim meet. The retaliation is swift and merciless.

Yet the war shifts when Dread throws Reverie into the campus pool and she clings to him in terror, revealing her hydrophobia for the first time. The confrontation also makes their previously implicit attraction explicit: Dread kisses Reverie, she initially strikes him and then kisses him back, and calling him by his real name, Kellan, produces a powerful reaction from him. Their subsequent sexual relationship retains the power struggles that characterized their antagonism. Dread initially coerces Reverie by giving her the choice between sex and entering the water, while Reverie increasingly acknowledges her own desire for him and deliberately challenges his attempts to control their encounters. Within days they have slept together multiple times, and their alternating perspectives reveal both Dread’s growing possessiveness and Reverie’s conflicted attraction alongside her continuing anger toward him. Dread declares Reverie his girlfriend to the entire university through a photograph posted to his four-million-follower social media account, despite Reverie’s protestations.

Lionel’s release brings his menace physically closer. Notes addressed to “Angel”—a nickname only Lionel ever used—begin appearing in Reverie’s room and backpack, accompanied by hair that forensic testing eventually confirms belongs to Georgia Farrell, proving Lionel still possesses his trophy lockbox of evidence. A missing student named Mindy Sackler vanishes after a date arranged through a fake profile called Charlie Love, mirroring Reverie’s birth name and listing car salesman as an occupation. A woman named Jennifer Holbrook is murdered and her remains scattered across a nursing home parking lot—a location Reverie recognizes from a childhood photograph as the backdrop behind her and Lionel, taken by Margaret Lever on the very day Lionel murdered her. Each delivery is a layered message: Come home, or the consequences will keep compounding. Reverie tries to transfer to a university in London; Dread sabotages the paperwork and refuses to let her go.

After Reverie finally tells Dread that she witnessed Lionel dismember Georgia Farrell as a child and remained silent because Lionel threatened to kill Regina, Dread is forced to reconsider the assumptions that fueled his revenge. He remains angry about the consequences of Reverie’s public support for Lionel but begins to recognize that she, too, was a child under his control. A conversation with Olive Benderman, whose mother was also one of the Locksmith’s suspected victims, helps Dread accept that their suffering does not have to compete: Olive reminds him that “[t]wo people can hurt at the same time” (388). This realization begins to alter how he understands both Reverie and the anger around which he has built much of his identity.

Dread takes Reverie to a remote cottage in the Colorado mountains where, against a bare winter garden, he shows her a dried bleeding-heart plant—the biodegradable urn in which he buried his mother’s ashes when he followed Reverie to Colorado, choosing this location because she was here. Standing beside Katherine’s resting place, he tells Reverie he is falling for her and confesses that he has never been afraid to “drown,” only afraid of her. Reverie, still guarded but unable to deny what she feels, does not say the words back, but she does not run, either.

The situation ruptures on the day that Dread flies to Florida for the Division I National Championship swim meet. Reverie returns to his dorm with Severen and walks into a scene of operatic horror: Mindy Sackler’s body has been dissected and staged throughout the room with surgical precision—her skinned torso in the desk chair, her severed head spinning from the ceiling fan, her detached forearms made into lamp fixtures, her flayed skin spread like a blanket across the mattress. Reverie and Severen are splattered with blood before the fan is stopped. Police arrive quickly, and an officer who recognizes Reverie immediately arrests her on the assumption that the serial killer’s daughter has finally followed her father’s example. The novel ends there, mid-arrest, Reverie drenched in Mindy’s blood, the full truth of who coordinated the delivery—Lionel, his copycat partner, someone else entirely—still unresolved, the lockbox that could convict Lionel for all his crimes still hidden somewhere, and the question of whether Reverie will survive long enough to tell Dread that she loves him left dangerously open.