 | Tourist Season (The Seasons of Carnage Trilogy, #1) by Brynne Weaver ★★★★★ Read: January 21, 2026 400 pages |
I went into Tourist Season completely blind and ended up with my heart in my throat, laughing at wildly inappropriate moments, and falling hard for a gardener-serial-killer in flip-flops.
This is a serial killer x serial killer romance set in a small coastal town that leans all the way into the spooky-tourist-trap vibe. Harper is the town gardener, the soft, quirky girl who talks to her plants and feeds snacks to her pet crow, and also quietly disposes of “bad people” in a wood chipper and uses them as fertilizer. Nolan is the man who comes to town with a very personal grudge and a meticulous revenge plan, fully convinced he knows exactly who she is and what she did to him. I adored Harper. She looks like sunshine and pastel cottagecore, but her moral compass is sharp, and the way she protects her town and her old man, Arthur, is so fiercely tender. Nolan took me longer, but watching this very rigid, trauma-locked man slowly unravel around her, get possessive in completely wrong but delicious ways, and then have his entire worldview shattered was extremely satisfying.
The tone is my favorite kind of dark. The deaths are grisly, there is a lot of on-page violence and past trauma, but Brynne Weaver balances it with genuinely funny dark humor and a cast of weirdos that feel alive. There is a crow who eats human bits and says “pretty murder bird,” a murder-grandpa with Alzheimer’s who still has fangs, and a small town full of oblivious locals and true-crime “investigators” who are much more dangerous than they think. The romance slides from enemies and wrong-person revenge into obsessive partnership, with plenty of banter, consent woven into the dirty talk, some intense pain-and-pleasure play, and a couple of scenes that absolutely wrecked me emotionally without ever feeling gratuitous.
Plot-wise, it’s very engaged with identity, survivor’s guilt, and what you become when the world has already tried to consume your trauma once. I loved the way secrets are layered: everyone is lying about something, but not always for the reasons you expect. My favorite parts were the high-stakes scenes where that glossy, jokey tone falls away and you see how far Nolan will go to save Harper and how far she will go to protect the people she loves, even when she believes she’s already lost him. There is a near-death sequence that had my eyes swimming and a quieter hospital stretch that made me fall for them as a couple, not just as chaos gremlins with murder kits.
Important to mention: this is very much book one of a trilogy. You get a full, intense arc between Harper and Nolan, but the larger mystery and some pieces of their relationship are left unresolved on purpose. You are not walking away with a neat bow or a completely safe feeling; you are walking out knowing the real monster is still out there and that their story is far from over. Personally, I liked that. It felt like the right place to pause, even if it left my stomach a little twisted. If you need a perfectly wrapped HEA in one volume, you might want to wait until the series is complete. If you’re happy to dive into a sharp, bloody, darkly funny serial killer romance with a crow, corpse compost, and a heroine who refuses to be a perfect victim, Tourist Season is absolutely worth the ride.
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