After reading the Ruinous Love trilogy, I was ecstatic to learn that Brynne Weaver had a new book coming out. Tourist Season is the first book in the Seasons of Carnage trilogy, and it’s an enemies-to-lovers dark romantic comedy once again exploring two serial killers falling in love and all the wild and sexy antics that come along with it.
Cape Carnage, a quirky tourist town with a long and macabre history, has been Harper Starling’s home for the last four years. When she arrived, she vowed to protect the town she fell in love with, but every tourist season, there’s some asshole behaving badly, threatening her home.
So Harper kills those who deserve it and feeds them into her beloved wood chipper, using the remains to fertilize the flowers she plants in her garden. While she’s not doing murderous things, she takes care of her eccentric, elderly neighbor with Alzheimer’s.
Nolan Rhodes is in Cape Carnage for revenge. He’s on the hunt for the last person on his hit list, the driver responsible for the hit-and-run that killed his brother, Harper Starling. His quest for vengeance has consumed him for four years, and he won’t stop until Harper is dead by his hand.
With more than one serial killer in this whimsical tourist town, long-buried secrets start to resurface. When a true crime sleuth comes to town, investigating a vanished serial killer from long ago, Harper and Nolan are forced to work together to keep everyone’s crimes hidden.
As their uneasy alliance becomes something more, the delicate balance in Cape Carnage threatens to fall, exposing everything.
I’m sure nobody goes on vacation expecting to be dismembered and put through a wood chipper, but some tourists are just assholes and deserve their fate.
As someone who lives in a tourist town, this first line hit different. I laughed out loud, immediately hooked on this story.
Harper and Nolan are undeniably over-the-top characters, in keeping with Brynne Weaver’s unique style. They’re gleefully violent and wildly quirky. She has a pet raven that she’s trained to talk, and he keeps a scrapbook of all his murder victims. It’s so wonderfully weird.
There’s an unusual kind of banter between these two, given that they harbor fantasies of murdering each other. The conflicts they have all largely could have been solved with a single honest conversation that Nolan and Harper obstinately refuse to have, but their stubbornness makes for a very entertaining dynamic.
Even with all the hate, there is an instant attraction between them. The romance is a slow burn while they fight said attraction, and even when the slow burn finally ignites, most of the spice has an angry quality, although it’s also incredibly passionate.
There is a certain suspension of disbelief required with Tourist Season. How are all these serial killers existing in this universe without some sort of task force getting involved? But that’s not the point. This is for the fun of it, and to point out that some behaviors just might be worse than murder.
This book is written in Brynne Weaver’s famed style, which means it’s gory and gruesome but also hilarious. It’s infused with a strong, albeit twisted and unconventional, sense of justice. There’s an unhinged list of trigger warnings at the beginning that sets the whole tone.
And now I’m helping a woman I want to kill to cover up murders committed by another serial killer. This is the most incestuous murder party I’ve ever heard of.
Throughout Tourist Season, I could feel the tension in the plot building, and it had me voraciously turning pages like a maniac, desperate to see where this all goes.
In the end, there are some questions left open-ended, setting up the rest of the series. This is not a standalone; Harper and Nolan’s story continues in the second book. At the time of writing, the release date and title have yet to be announced, but I’ll be leaping on that pre-order the moment it becomes available because this book is an absolute gem.
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