Genre/Tags: Multiple Serial Killers, Stalking, Humour, Blood and Gore, Sexual Kink 

Author: Brynne Weaver

Story Rating: 5 Stars

Narrator: Robert Hatchet, Samantha Brentmoor

Narrator Rating: 5 Stars

Length: 11 hours & 57 minutes

Audiobook Buy Links: Audible, Author Page

Blurb: 

Welcome to Cape Carnage! Visit Once, Stay Forever.

You can hide in the farthest reaches of the deepest hell, and I will still drag you out. Even the devil can’t save you from me.

Cape Carnage is a seaside town of colourful houses, quirky shops, and an unusually high body count. But with tourists comes trouble, and Harper Starling won’t let anyone ruin her picture-perfect home. A skilled gardener with killer instincts, Harper protects her sanctuary at any cost – especially for her aging mentor with a fading memory. Troublesome tourists don’t check out of Carnage. They compost beneath Harper’s award-winning flowerbeds.

But Nolan Rhodes isn’t your average tourist. Devilishly handsome, disarmingly charming, and skilled with a blade, Nolan is relentless in the pursuit of revenge. On every anniversary of the hit-and-run accident that fractured his life, Nolan slays another target. And he’s saved the best for the undeniably beautiful Harper Starling. The problem? Harper isn’t the monster he expected. And she won’t go down without a fight.

When an amateur true crime investigator comes to Cape Carnage on the trail of a long-lost serial killer, Harper and Nolan strike an uneasy truce. If Nolan helps Harper protect her town, she’ll keep quiet about his hunting habits . . . for now. But their alliance soon spirals into obsession, one that threatens to shatter every secret in Carnage – including their fragile love.

Tourist Season is a darkly funny, slow burn enemies-to-lovers romance where destruction and desire are balanced on the edge of a blade – and where love is the most dangerous battleground of all.

Review: 

 What is it about these men and their books of blood and skin?

I enjoyed the hell outta this book. It has so much of what I like – the quirky, the diabolical, the obsessive. The stalkery, crazily improbable love. Nolan and Harper made me laugh. They had me cheering for them. It’s not every day you meet a fellow serial killer who is obsessively in hate love with you while understanding your experience. 

For the past four years Harper Starling has lived in Cape Carnage, a small, quirky town that swells during tourist season when it leans into its name with things such as a Taste of Terror food festival, including Build a Corpse, boxcar races that are verging on the insane, and their theatre’s gory reimagining of Beauty and the Beast. Then there’s shops like Maya’s Magical Mixtures that makes and sells items like Piss Off, Bug Fucker, and Corpse Reviver Hangover Juice. Glorious names like this inhabit the pages throughout.

Harper lives with town doyen Arthur Lancaster in a cottage on the grounds of Lancaster Manor. She gardens for him, and generally looks in on him. There is tragedy in Arthur’s past, and he’s also dealing with dementia in current time. He took Harper under his dark but caring wing after she first arrived in Carnage. Arthur isn’t on page a lot but he’s a scene stealer. He’s a man you know has been full of spirit and grandiosity, still is, but losing your memory is a bitch. Luckily, both Harper and Arthur’s grandson, Lukas, genuinely care. But only Harper knows Arthur’s dark past. The author treats dementia with sensitivity while making sure you clearly see who Arthur is underneath.

“I just didn’t expect it. He kept telling me he’s an ‘old man’-“
“I know,” she says, exasperation heavy in her voice. “He loves to tell people that. ‘I’m so old, help an old man pick up his cane, would you, dear?’ – then bam. He knives you in the fucking throat.”

Harper: She had me from the very beginning when she was cheerily chipping Bryce Mahoney’s body. He wasn’t a nice man so he’s chopped up before being shredded to nourish the gardens and also feed Morpheus, a raven Harper has hand-raised who think’s bits of Bryce’s body are om nom nom.

People visiting this touristy town who are deemed awful, well… they get Mahoney’d – chucked into a woodchipper affectionately known as Cookie Monster. It’s all rather eco friendly, and there’s nothing like a person who enjoys their job.

She is keeping a legacy alive and doing what comes naturally to her nowadays. 

I’m sure nobody goes on vacation expecting to be dismembered and put through a woodchipper, but some tourists are just assholes and deserve their fate.

Then Harper discovers the severed head of a guy in her bird feeder, someone she was just talking to the previous day. She didn’t murder this one. Nolan, the MMC, who did kill him and thought he’d scare her shitless, was incredulous at her nonchalance while she talked to Arthur on the phone, having a laugh over Steffano – or is that Christina? – Ricci shoes as Nolan secretly observes. Yep. I decided I was totally onboard for this entire wild ride. 

She returns to the bird feeder and sets the orange bottle at her feet before she pulls the gloves on, and then she’s reaching into the bird feeder to yank the head free from between the roof and the platform.
What.
The.
Fuck…?

I also like the equality of a fictional female serial killer. There’s something perverse about women, who bring life into the world, being the ones dispatching them. Plus men outnumber women in that whole serial killer area. Why yes, I like darker reading and equality.   

Nolan: Loved him. Nolan has come to Cape Carnage on leave from Search and Rescue. Heh, a rather ironic vocation for him. Six whole weeks of relaxation, oh, and vengeance on the last ‘piece’ of the murdery puzzle of the people who ran him and his brother Billy down in a hit and run. Billy died and it’s been a long road to recovery for Nolan.

First, check into the hotel. Second, go for a walk to loosen things up. Maybe find a sandwich. Third, start hunting down that bitch to give her the slow and painful death she deserves for making me suffer immeasurable grief and pain and torture and indignity. Fourth, hot tub.

Hmm. Sounds like your everyday, garden variety vacation plan. You can see he‘s had plenty of time to plumb the depths of anger, bitterness, and a driving need for payback, so he’s had Harper Starling on his mind for four long years. The issue is, when you obsess that much over one person, when they become your primary purpose to keep putting one foot in front of the other, it can turn into something more, especially in books like this one. Flip of a coin, baby. I was here for it.  

There is a serendipitous meeting not too far into the book when Nolan doesn’t know who Harper is, and vice versa. They flirt a little, until a barista calls her (unusual) name at the Shipwrecked Bean coffee shop. Then it’s game on. Yeah, he tries very hard to make it game on but Harper has attitude and doesn’t react on any occasion like he thinks she will, and damn, she’s… something! One thing you have to remember if you’re actually a sociopathic serial killer, Nolan, it’s that games are part of the deal. Be prepared.

 The Story: There are multiple threads running throughout Tourist Season –

• Nolan’s obsession and how it’s moving from one objective to another. Harper pretty much one-upping him, grabbing his skin scrapbook that details his grizzly murder spree and effectively holding him to ransom. This is an interesting way of keeping the MCs spinning in each other’s orbits. She tasks him with helping her in regards to a little big problem of a lot of bodies buried on land that Arthur’s grandson unwittingly and recently sold off. And she’d like Nolan to keep Sam Porter away, the head of the Sleuthseekers, who’s purposefully and threateningly in Carnage making a doco which is about Arthur and more. 
• There’s Harper’s determination to stay with Arthur and protect him.
• Nolan has moments when he remembers why he’s in Cape Carnage, the emotional and physical pain he’s been through, but Harper just reels him back in without especially trying. She likes his dimples, southern accent, and he is very easy on the eye, but she’s not letting that sway her too much. Eh. Maybe a little. The sex, when they get there, is good. 
• Harper has secrets. They take a while to unravel.  
• All of the main players have trauma that drives them to do what they do, having shaped their intersecting lives. It’s really well done.

The book is not without a few little issues, romance always has the obligatory lip biting. I don’t know who does that outside books. And Harper over ruminating, ‘but he only does this or hangs around me because of the boooook….‘ Oh, honey. No! It was totally your perfectly syncing serial killer ways, quirkiness, and hotness.    

The Romance: I will say that this romance isn’t a total slow burn. By the 18% mark Nolan is having serious whiplash about how he sees Harper.

What the fuck. I am not flirting with the woman I might kill.
Will kill. I will kill her.
Later.

Having said that, the romance also isn’t rush-rush. It’s midpoint. It takes a while for things to hot up because there’s such a complex past and lack of trust between them. It takes a while to whittle these away. In amongst the bodies being chipped or exhumed, Sam Porter and his increasingly invasive snooping, and their own issues, the MCs manage to have some spicy sex. It’s not too much but it’s hot. The Goldilocks of sex. 

The sex is kink: Hate fucking. Rough sex. Some knife play. A degree of dominance and subjugation-

“Fuck me like you hate me,” she breathes.

+ humour. 

“What’s your safe word?”
“Ballmeat.”
“That sounds pretty bratty to me.”
“Just a little bit.”

Ballmeat is a running gag. You have to read it. But I loved it. It’s funny.

Narration: Thank the universe for authors who use dual narration. It’s the absolute best when you have main characters who aren’t the same gender. It flows effortlessly here. Stellar is a word that best describes Robert Hatchet and Samantha Brentwood’s narration. They lovingly and wickedly bring Nolan and Harper to multifaceted and flawed life. They really are so, so good. Totally value-added to the story Brynne Weaver created.     

Dear god.
I knew Harper was game for some fucked-up shit given the situation with Arthur, but I have clearly underestimated her. And while the fact that she’s into a little torture and murder should give me more reason to return to the idea of seeking vengeance against her, it’s having the opposite effect.  

Indeed!

Overview:

The author seems to be in her element writing off-kilter, amoral, witty serial killers based on this and her back catalogue. I like morally grey, morally ambiguous, morally bankrupt characters. Buying this was a Kazza no-brainer. I loved the noir humour. That the MCs clicked with obvious reservations. Arthur was also developed sensitively without taking away his identity. If you ever want to hear a laundry list of content warnings, this is your book. It’s long, some tongue in cheek, others very compassionate.

The writing, this story, worked for me. It was totally my cup of tea coffee. I loved Nolan and Harper. I’m happy and sad that this is a trilogy. I have to wait for more but that also means I get to spend extended time with these characters in the future. While Harper and Nolan are pretty concrete by the end of this book, as concrete as two serial killers with a messy past can be, there is an interesting plot twist. Bring on 2026. It’s promising me some very good reading. As for the well named Tourist Season, 5 Stars!