Tourist Season (The Seasons of Carnage Trilogy, #1) by Brynne Weaver 
Series: The Seasons of Carnage Trilogy #1
Published by Self Published on September 23, 2025
Genres: Dark/Gothic Romance
Pages: 368
Format: eBook
Source: Amazon
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Welcome to Cape Carnage! Visit Once, Stay Forever.
Cape Carnage is a seaside town of colorful 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 last: 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.
All the fun and murderyousness of the original series.
In this spinoff of the Ruinous Love Trilogy, Nolan Rhodes has come to the quiet town of Cape Carnage for revenge. Nolan believes Harper Starling caused the hit and run accident which left him severely injured and his younger brother dead. Nolan has already eliminated the three occupants of the vehicle but he has saved the driver, Harper, for last. Then maybe he can finally find peace. But from the moment he meets Harper, nothing has gone as expected.
Harper is hiding many secrets of her own. She is living in the cottage on the property of an older gentleman whose memory is starting to go. Is he her grandfather, a family friend or possibly be an aging serial killer? A developer is coming to build a big hotel by the lake and Nolan finds Harper digging up old corpses since she only has a few weeks to remove all the bodies before the backhoes come in and find them. These have been in the ground a lot longer than Harper has lived in Cape Carnage so who put them in the ground, especially since Harper prefers to use the woodchipper she nicknamed Cookie, to dispose of her victims.
Nolan came here to dissect her body but now he’s obsessed with dissecting her mind and he finds himself so fascinated with Harper that he can’t help himself and joins her in her nightly un-burials. As the days pass, he is more interested in figuring out everything he got wrong about Harper Sterling. That might have more to do with the fact that one of the secrets that Harper is hiding is the fact that she isn’t really Harper Starling.
THOUGHTS:
We met Harper in the Ruinous Love Trilogy under another name which is why Nolan is getting all these mixed signals. She is hiding in plain sight under the name Harper Starling, even though she knows all about Harper and what happened to Nolan and his brother. This story is less an uncovering of Harper’s story than what else is happening in Cape Carnage because Nolan and Harper aren’t the only killers walking these streets.
I was absolutely drawn into this story. If you liked Butcher & Blackbird and the rest of the Ruinous Love Trilogy, there is no question that you will enjoy your time in Cape Carnage just as much. This series will feature Harper and Nolan and the other characters that we met as opposed to changing the main characters for each book. Nolan and Harper have a lot more story to unfold not just involving them but also all the secondary murders in town. I am excited to uncover more of the bodies hiding around this town.
Favorite Scene:
I suck in a breath to resume the argument about his trophy scrapbook when another voice interrupts my thoughts.
“Pretty murder bird,” Morpheus says from the garden wall. Our gazes cut toward him as he pecks the last of the morsels off the stone. “Nom, nom. C is for cookie.”
Morpheus gives three knocking clucks and then mimics the sound of the diesel tractor engine.
Nolan’s eyes slide to the woodchipper and then back to mine, disbelief now mixing with the revulsion that still simmers in his face. “Did you name your woodchipper after the beloved Sesame Street character Cookie Monster and then teach a raven to beg for human snacks made from the people you murdered?”
A thick swallow slides down my throat. “It’s not as bad as it sounds.”
“No,” Nolan says as all the light leaves his eyes. “It’s worse.”
“That’s good enough for me,” Morpheus recites in a painfully accurate replica of my own impersonation of Cookie Monster.
I’m desperate to drag a hand down my face, but I’m unwilling to let go of the gun or the bottle of Piss-Off! Neither feels like enough of a weapon when Nolan stares at me with such unforgiving malice. There’s enough heat in his glare to ignite a violent eruption in a dormant volcano.
“You’re a terrible human being,” he says, as though he’s affirming it to himself as much as he is to me.
“You don’t know anything about me,” I whisper.
“Oh, really? I think I know plenty.” He takes a step closer, and though everything in my body screams at me to run, I stay right where I am with the gun aimed at his face. “I know you kill people and drive away. I know you dispose of dead bodies with a woodchipper.”
“You kill people and make them into a scrapbook, so that’s a bit of the pot calling the kettle black, don’t you think?”
“At least I dispose of them properly. You do realize bone chips don’t just magically disintegrate in the soil, right? I guess I know how you get all those gardening awards now.”
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