When two lonely serial killers find somebody who’s exactly their brand of bizarre, it makes for a beautiful romance, if a rather nonsensical plot.

And that rather sums up my review of Tourist Season by Brynne Weaver in a nutshell. It was hysterically funny. It was also complete nonsense. I didn’t care. It’s well written black comedy, and I apparently can’t get enough of first person POV serial killers.

I should probably see a therapist about that. But instead, I decided I needed a murder raven called Morpheus, and ran off to buy all the rest of Brynne Weaver’s books. Because while the novel wasn’t perfect, it was perfect for my current mood and I desperately wanted more. I cannot express how distressed I am that the trilogy is, at present, unfinished. So fair warning, if you’re not a fan of cliff-hangers and being forced to wait for the final book of a series, hold off on this one until Hunting Season is out next April.

Aside from the irritating open loop in my brain as a result of the Seasons of Carnage trilogy being unfinished, Tourist Season is dark, gloomy, weirdly cheerful, comforting, and just the right amount of grisly. 

It also manages to be so understated about the whole thing that the bloody violence and mayhem never stop it from being funny. And I mean properly funny. Not, somebody wrote a book and threw in jokes every five minutes to remind us it’s a comedy, funny. 

Funny.

It’s just two weird people who happen to be serial killers discovering each other and realising they’ve found another version of themselves in a different body.

Which actually, is rather lovely, when you think about it.

Completely fucked-up. But adorable. And that should probably be a tagline for the whole series.

Harper Starling lives in Cape Carnage, a picturesque little coastal town where she works as a gardener for an elderly gentleman named Arthur, and occasionally murders passing tourists when they have the gall to be unpleasant while visiting town. 

Nolan Rhodes arrives in town as a tourist for a little ‘bird watching’. He’s spent years hunting the people responsible for the hit-and-run that killed his brother, and Harper (ahem, Starling) is the final person on his list, and the only bird he has any interest in.

That interest is purely murderous, until he runs into her in a coffee shop and, catastrophically, finds himself attracted to her. 

Quite considerably attracted to her.

Harper’s equally intrigued by Nolan. And so begins a Meet Cute involving a severed leg bone in foil wrap, and an unhealthy amount of puns about ball meat.

Clearly it’s the start of a beautiful relationship. Two people who would normally be perfectly happy murdering somebody else, suddenly have to navigate the profoundly inconvenient experience of finding that somebody else distractingly sexy.

I loved it.

The book isn’t perfect, there are things about the plot that make zero sense, and some of Harper and Nolan’s decisions are remarkably stupid for people who are otherwise quite intelligent. But if you made everything perfectly sensible, Tourist Season couldn’t be anywhere near as funny as it is.

And that’s the part Weaver gets spectacularly right, which in a dark romance novel is genuinely tough to pull off.

Harper And Nolan Are Two Very Odd Ducks

Spoiler Warning For Tourist Season: I’ve tried to keep it to a minimum but this is not a spoiler-free review.

I’m normally not a fan of insta-attraction as the foundation of some profound romantic connection. You know the scene. Two people bump into each other in a coffee shop, take one look at each other, swoon, and suddenly there’s this weird, immediate love connection. They’re deeply devoted to each other, inseparable, willing to compromise their whole lives, because they found their One True Love and need no further confirmation because they just knew.

Instantly.

Come on, love. You thought he was hot. 

Fine. 

Doesn’t mean you know him. Certainly doesn’t mean you’re in love with him.

Harper and Nolan, though? 

I totally bought it.

Because most people aren’t serial killers. Although, the longer I spend in Cape Carnage, the less convinced I am of that fact. The point is, a serial killer has such an unusual nature. Something in them is fundamentally odd compared to most other human beings. And I can see that a person living in that isolation of oddness might very well recognise something familiar in somebody else who shares it. Like, if everybody has their own magnetic field, tuned to a particular frequency. And most people resonate at roughly the same frequency, so the vibe you get off any given person is relatively familiar. But when you meet someone that makes you feel instantly off about them? That’s because they resonate to a different vibe, and it does not jive with yours.

It’s why you get a gut reaction to people sometimes, a sense there’s something off about them.

Not scientifically, of course. But generally, if you’re at all empathic, you pick up on people’s energy. Their frequency. 

Now imagine your frequency is so bizarre you’ve never met another person even close to it. You’ve spent your whole life getting that ‘something’s off’ vibe from everyone you meet. You’ve spent your entire life being the only odd duck in a very crowded pond of normality.

Then you meet somebody whose frequency is exactly the same as yours.

I can totally buy that something in you would instinctively recognise that, probably before you had any conscious understanding of what you were recognising.

That’s Harper and Nolan.

They’re both exceptionally strange people, but they’re exactly the same kind of strange. Which gives them this immediate ability to bounce off each other, even in the most bizarre situations. Their personalities and interactions are what make Tourist Season so funny. And because they’re operating on the same bizarre frequency, they understand each other’s peculiarities in ways nobody else can.

They’re not instantly in love. They’re instantly fascinated. Which makes the attraction believable in a way two ordinary people fancying each other and declaring a connection just isn’t. And yes, they’re also attracted to each other. But it didn’t override everything else. Nolan’s clearly interested in Harper from the second he lays eyes on her. He’s behaving like a perfectly normal man who’s met a woman he finds attractive and intends to pursue her.

Then he hears her name.

His body language changes so dramatically Harper notices something’s wrong. His attraction to her hasn’t disappeared, but his revenge plot takes precedence the second he realises who she is. He enacts the revenge plan that drove him to Cape Carnage, but his attraction starts seeping in around the edges. 

Stalking your prey? Perfectly reasonable. Find a man perving on her in the bushes?

Unacceptable.

Nolan kills the guy for perving on the woman he fancies, despite having come there to stalk, torment, and ultimately kill her himself. In a bizarre and frankly hilarious pique of jealousy, he murders him, dismembers him, and leaves his head in Harper’s bird feeder.

And that’s where things get interesting.

It Makes Perfect Sense That Nolan Falls For Harper

Given the whole ‘head in a bird feeder’ situation, Nolan’s expecting Harper to pitch an absolute fit. But she doesn’t. And naturally Nolan finds her even more interesting. He becomes increasingly fascinated by her reactions, finding himself more and more attracted to somebody he’s still supposedly planning to murder.

Harper, meanwhile, is attracted to Nolan from the start but has no idea why he’s come to Cape Carnage or who he is. Then she finds a severed head in her bird feeder, and turns to see Nolan standing there clapping another man’s dismembered hands. To which her response is basically,

Well, that tracks. 

Of course this guy’s wrong. I like him.

It’s just brilliant.

The physical attraction is immediate, but the emotional attachment grows out of discovering how astonishingly well they fit together. And the spice works for much the same reason. It’s very good, incidentally. They’re kinky, but not weirdly kinky. Just the right amount of kinky for a funny, entertaining dark romance. Not vanilla, but not so bizarre or uncomfortable it gets distracting.  And because their attraction develops through all these increasingly peculiar interactions, the physical side feels completely natural.

Despite him still planning to murder her.

The Comedy Works Because Strange Is Normal Here

Tourist Season is one of the better black comedies I’ve read. The plot isn’t particularly clever, or beautifully constructed, but it’s so completely committed to the ridiculousness of the world. Take Harper’s woodchipper. From a forensic perspective, shoving human remains through a woodchipper is a fucking ridiculous way to dispose of bodies.

Anybody sneezes near that thing with a bottle of luminol, Harper’s fucked.

But she knows that.

She’s not too stupid to understand it’s a terrible disposal method. Intellectually, she’s fully aware, she just doesn’t care. Harper’s a gardener, and loves the idea of taking the remains of shitty people and using them to grow beautiful things. This could easily have turned into a book about how Harper is two people, the public persona and the private serial killer. Instead it’s something a lot more interesting, because there’s no real difference between who Harper is in public and who she is in private, aside from the fact she can’t disclose her real name and doesn’t mention she periodically murders people.

If anything, the real division in Harper’s identity is between the woman she is now and the person she was before her trauma. She’s clearly not who she used to be, and is perfectly confident and comfortable with who she’s become, and that’s far more interesting.

Her killing and her gardening come from the same peculiar way of understanding the world.

Which is also why she’s so funny.

And Cape Carnage is just full of exactly the same absurdities. The number of people who’ve gone missing in this town without anybody seeming particularly concerned is ludicrous. The amateur investigators are funny, yet remarkably stupid for people supposedly investigating mysterious disappearances because they’re all so oblivious to the potential dangers of what they’re doing.

It’s like everyone here’s collectively decided to ignore the blindingly obvious. The number of serial killers wandering this supposedly charming little town is absurd. Yet it all serves the comedy. But because everyone does it, it sort of works. And it means the book doesn’t have to make a joke out of every situation, because the situations themselves are so bizarre yet so normalised. So instead of ‘awkward situational comedy’ which I honestly never find even slightly funny, we have a genuinely funny book driven by characters whose reactions to the increasingly bizarre are so matter of fact and weird themselves that everyone and everything carries a baseline level of laugh out loudness.

That’s why it works.

We don’t have comedy, and murder. We have a world in which murder is so ordinary the characters have enough mental energy left over to concern themselves with gardening, romance, and whatever the hell Arthur’s done with his black bag.

The Arthur And Alzheimer’s Plot Is So Well Done

Speaking of Arthur, I loved him.

I found his quirks and oddness endearing. He’s odd in a slightly different cadence to Harper and Nolan, which prevented the whole thing from getting samey. He’s a full character with real personality, history and strangeness of his own. 

And his incessant demands for that bloody bag sent me.

But I also found his Alzheimer’s storyline surprisingly lovely. Weaver depicted the earlier stages of Alzheimer’s remarkably realistically (at least, from what my personal experience has unfortunately shown). Not necessarily the later stages, but the early confusion, the repetition, the moments of clarity, and the gradual changes in somebody’s independence felt horribly, heartbreakingly real.

Most of us have had a relative (often elderly) who’s started declining in some way, and there’s a very particular, awfully familiar heartache to it. Arthur’s funny, but he’s also vulnerable. And Harper’s relationship with him brings a different kind of tenderness to the book.

I particularly appreciated that his Alzheimer’s doesn’t suddenly erase his personality or turn him into a tragic plot device. He’s still Arthur, with all his peculiarities, even as his memory and mind are failing him.

I did have questions about the depth of his relationship with Harper. While I’m perfectly happy accepting a town full of serial killers and a woman who uses dead tourists as fertiliser, there are some things I struggle to overlook.

And surprisingly, it’s not the murders.

Where the Ridiculousness Stops Working

Major plot spoilers from here onwards. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

The thing that frustrated me most about Tourist Season wasn’t the characters behaving outrageously, but that they occasionally behaved in ways that didn’t make sense for them as characters. Not the way Weaver has written them.

Nolan is the main offender.

For the most part, I liked him. I believed in his attraction to Harper, and I thought the way his feelings became tangled up with his revenge obsession was perfectly reasonable. Rage, revenge, passion, sexual attraction. All powerful, overlapping emotions. I can buy somebody in Nolan’s position struggling to untangle them.

What I don’t understand is his lack of thought about the person he’s planning to murder.

Nolan’s an intelligent guy. A firefighter, now working in search and rescue because his injuries prevent him from returning to firefighting. Somebody whose entire professional life has revolved around rescuing people. Yet he’s spent four years hunting down and killing everybody who was in the car that struck him and his brother.

Obviously, what happened to them was horrific. His brother died. Nolan suffered terrible injuries. The driver was drunk, and the people in the car left them there instead of stopping to help.

Indefensible.

But three of the four people Nolan wants revenge on weren’t even driving. The three already dead at the start of the book, didn’t run them over at all. They were passengers in a car involved in an accident. Yes, they abandoned them both. But Billy was already dead. So even if they had called for help, it wouldn’t have saved him. Not to say that excuses it, clearly it doesn’t. But I struggle with the idea that somebody as intelligent as Nolan, who’s spent his career saving people, never considers the morality of murdering all four people in response.

Weirdly, I’m now halfway through Harvest Season and that question has somewhat been answered. But for Tourist Season, it was something that was glaringly, confusingly jarring to me. 

Surely somebody with Nolan’s background would at least have thought about the difference between deliberately killing someone and making a dreadful decision after an accident?

And then there’s Harper herself. Because nothing about the woman he’s getting to know tracks with the irresponsible party girl he believes was driving that night. So why doesn’t it occur to him to wonder?

Not abandon all plans to kill her, but at least pause and consider?

If she’d spent four years becoming somebody fundamentally different, would he still have the right to kill her for a mistake she made when she was younger? There was some genuinely interesting psychological territory here that Nolan simply never explored.

And he’s too clever for it to just not occur to him. If he’d considered and dismissed it, I’d have found that more believable. The fact he doesn’t makes it feel less like an intentional character flaw and more like a bit of selective stupidity to keep his revenge plot going.

Which brings me to Harper…

Oh Look, Miscommunication….

For all Nolan’s questionable decision-making, my biggest gripe of this whole book is Why didn’t Harper just tell him she’s not Harper fucking Starling?

She knows Nolan thinks she’s the woman who was driving the car that killed his brother. She knows the real Harper Starling is already dead. So why doesn’t she just tell him?

Literally:

I’m not who you think I am. I wasn’t driving the car that night. You don’t have to murder her, she’s already dead. I did that. You’re welcome. Sorry I didn’t call for help and I left you and your brother on the road. I was scared.

Not saying that would make everything fine. But…like come on, just explain! The only reason Harper doesn’t tell him is because she promised Arthur she won’t reveal her real identity. We don’t really see enough of how she and Arthur came to understand each other, learnt one another’s secrets, or how their bond became so absolute that Harper would rather risk dying than break her promise.

Even in the face of a man ready to murder her, she’s not allowed to explain?

Really?

A little more thought about that would have helped enormously. As it stands, Harper doesn’t tell Nolan for the same reason Nolan never wonders if she’s the person he thinks she is: the plot fairies demand it.

Harper using a woodchipper to dispose of bodies is ridiculous, but makes perfect sense for her character. Nolan leaving a severed head in a bird feeder? Insane. Entirely in character. 

But Harper refusing to just tell him she’s not the woman who ran him over?

Nothing but plot-convenient miscommunication. And nobody likes that.

A Dark Romance That Knows How to Be Funny

Despite all that, I thoroughly enjoyed Tourist Season. If you loved Lights Out or Caught Up, this one is definitely for you. And if you’re not normally a dark romance reader but you’re curious about the genre, it’s a good place to dip your toe (just check your trigger warnings, as always).

The comedy makes the darkness easy to enjoy, but it doesn’t make the book any less dark. I’d describe Lights Out and Caught Up as dark romance lite, at best. Tourist Season felt like genuinely dark romance to me. Still on the lighter side, because it takes itself so unseriously, but the thing that makes dark romance dark is how deep the threat burrows inside the romance. And this one? It’s so tangled inside their relationship there’s really no separating it. It’s also not one-sided, which I loved. We’re all used to the dangerous men in dark romances, but both these people are serial killers. Harper herself is a killer, and she dismembers and disposes of the remains in truly revolting ways.

Grisly, yes. Unapologetically. It’s funny about it, and completely unserious, yet somehow still has some serious, thoughtful and tender moments. Harper’s PTSD is particularly well handled, so is Arthur’s deteriorating mental state, and while the mystery element is fairly thin, and I wouldn’t call it a thriller at all, it’s still a very enjoyable read if you love a good small town murder mystery.

The real joy of this book wasn’t the prose. It was watching two people whose personalities are so completely out of step with the rest of humanity discover somebody else is operating on exactly the same bizarre frequency. Then watching them bounce off each other and fall hopelessly in love.

There are plenty of things about Tourist Season that make zero sense. But, weirdly, I wouldn’t change a word of it.