There's a very specific anxiety that comes with reading book two of a trilogy you loved. You know, somewhere in your gut, that this is the "middle child" installment — the one that has to do all the unglamorous connective tissue work while book one got to have all the fun of introduction and book three gets to have all the fun of resolution. Harvest Season, Brynne Weaver's follow-up to the wildly beloved Tourist Season, knows exactly what kind of book it is, and it leans into that reality with a whole lot of murder, a whole lot of feelings, and — depending which reader you ask — either just the right amount of plot or not nearly enough of it.
I landed at 4 stars. Not because this book is flawless — it isn't — but because even when Brynne Weaver is spinning her wheels, she's spinning them with so much heart, humor, and heat that it's genuinely hard to be mad about it. This is a book that made me laugh, made me tear up over an aging serial killer's Alzheimer's diagnosis (yes, really, and yes, it works), and made me want to throw my Kindle across the room when that ending hit. That's a lot of emotional real estate for one novel to occupy, even an imperfect one.
⭐ Overall Rating: 4 / 5 Stars
🌶️ Spice Rating: 4 / 5 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
📖 Plot Rating: 3.5 / 5
📋 Plot Summary
Picking up immediately where Tourist Season left off, Harvest Season drops us right back into the delightfully deranged town of Cape Carnage, where Nolan Rhodes — who arrived in town with the singular mission of avenging his brother by eliminating Harper Starling — is now hopelessly, helplessly in love with the woman he came to kill. The problem is that knowing who Harper really is hasn't made anything simpler. If anything, Cape Carnage is "blooming with secrets, and they're ready to harvest," and every time Nolan digs one up, another grows right back in its place.
Harper isn't who Nolan thought she was. Her mentor and father-figure Arthur — an aging serial killer whose mind is beginning to fail him — might be more dangerous than either of them realized. And Sheriff Yates, previously content to look the other way, is suddenly everywhere, asking questions neither of them wants to answer. As if local law enforcement getting suspicious wasn't enough chaos, a group of true-crime obsessives calling themselves the SleuthSeekers descends on Cape Carnage searching for answers about their missing leader — a man who is, inconveniently for everyone involved, already very dead and buried somewhere Nolan helped make sure of.
Meanwhile, Harper is trying to balance caretaking duties for Arthur with the terrifying vulnerability of wanting something — someone — for herself for the first time in longer than she can remember. And looming over the entire book is the shadowy, mysterious figure known only as La Plume, whose identity readers get glimpses of long before Harper and Nolan catch on, creating a slow-building sense of dread that pays off in a finale so devastating that entire Goodreads comment sections have devolved into readers screaming into the void.
"Having a serial killer for a boyfriend comes with many benefits," Harper notes early on, and honestly? Fair. But as the bodies pile up and the SleuthSeekers close in, the question of whether love can survive obsession, deception, and body counts becomes less rhetorical and considerably more urgent.
👥 Character Summaries
Harper Starling remains one of the more compelling heroines in the dark rom-com space — a woman who has spent years burying her trauma (and, let's be honest, several bodies) in Cape Carnage, only to have Nolan unearth both. What makes Harper interesting in this installment is watching her wrestle with vulnerability in a way she hasn't allowed herself before. Her devotion to Arthur is the emotional backbone of the book, and her fear of losing him to his declining memory adds a layer of grief that grounds all the murder-and-mayhem plotting in something achingly human. That said, several readers have noted — and I have to agree, at least partially — that Harper's decision-making occasionally regresses in ways that feel more convenient for plot than true to her established growth.
Nolan Rhodes is, without exaggeration, the reason to read this book. He completes his full transformation here from a man who arrived in town obsessed with vengeance to a man who is, in the words of one enthusiastic reviewer, "such a lovesick puppy for Harper, it's not even funny." He abandons his job, plants himself in Cape Carnage, and runs an unofficial search-and-rescue operation for the people he and Harper know are already dead — all while trying to keep their relationship, and their secrets, intact. "If someday you decide you want me to go, it won't change anything for me," he tells Harper. "Even if I have to love you from a distance, I will never stop. You're mine. Always." If you are the kind of reader who wants a book boyfriend who operates entirely on "if he wanted to, he would" energy, Nolan delivers in spades.
Arthur, Harper's aging mentor and father figure, provides the novel's most surprising emotional gut-punch. His arc dealing with Alzheimer's disease is handled with a tenderness and accuracy that stopped multiple reviewers in their tracks — understandably so, given that Weaver has noted her own grandparents' experiences with dementia inspired this thread, and that a portion of the trilogy's royalties goes to Alzheimer's charities. "I'm afraid of losing myself every single day," Arthur confesses to Harper. "I was afraid of loving another daughter when I'd already had one taken from me. I am afraid of forgetting you, my Harper." Harper's response — "If you do forget me someday, I'll remind you. And I'll never forget you" — is the kind of quiet, devastating exchange that elevates this book above its gorier trappings.
Sheriff Yates provides mounting external pressure as his suspicion of the town's rising body count grows less passive and more pointed, while La Plume operates as the novel's central mystery-villain, orchestrated with enough dramatic irony that readers spend the whole book yelling at Nolan and Harper to trust their instincts. Secondary players like Lukas get some welcome romantic subplot texture of their own, though — as several readers noted — many of the side characters feel more like plot devices than fully three-dimensional people this time around.
🏷️ Tropes
- 🏘️ Small-Town Setting (Cape Carnage remains a character unto itself)
- 🐟 Fish Out of Water
- 😤 Grumpy x Grumpy
- 🚪 Forced Proximity
- 💘 He Falls First
- ☠️ Touch Her/Him and Die
- 🗡️ Villain x Villain
- 😈 Brat / Brat Tamer
- 🕵️ Enemies (Assassin) to Lovers, Continued
- 👨👧 Found Family / Father-Figure Bond
- 📖 Dual POV (including antagonist chapters)
- 🔪 Serial Killer Romance / Dark Rom-Com
⚠️ Trigger Warnings
Harvest Season is unambiguously a dark romance, and Weaver herself recommends checking the content warnings printed at the front of the book before diving in. Readers should be aware of:
- Graphic violence and murder, ongoing and central to the plot
- Gore, including body horror elements (one of Weaver's own reader-facing quotes cheekily warns, "For those of you who knew there would probably be more eyeball shit, and yet you still came back")
- Depiction of Alzheimer's/dementia, which — while handled sensitively — may be difficult for readers with personal experience of the disease in a loved one
- Kidnapping and captivity themes
- Discussion of past trauma relating to Harper's backstory
- BDSM-adjacent content, including brat-taming and pain play in intimate scenes
- Manipulation and psychological menace from the antagonist
- A significant, unresolved cliffhanger ending that some readers have described as genuinely distressing
💪 What Works Well
The single greatest strength of Harvest Season is Nolan and Harper's relationship itself. Weaver has built genuine, lived-in chemistry between these two, and this book gives that chemistry room to deepen in ways book one, by necessity of its enemies-to-lovers setup, couldn't. The forced proximity, the small gestures, the growing trust — it's all rendered with real tenderness, and even readers who found the plot lacking overwhelmingly agree that watching Harper and Nolan fall further for each other is a joy. "He fucks me like he hates me," Harper reflects at one point. "But with every touch, every caress, every strained whisper of my name, I know he loves me." That tension between darkness and devotion is exactly Weaver's brand, and she executes it beautifully here.
The Arthur subplot deserves special recognition as the emotional standout of the entire book. It would have been easy for an aging-mentor-with-dementia storyline to feel like an afterthought bolted onto a murder-romance plot, but instead it becomes the novel's most resonant thread — a reminder that even people who have done monstrous things can be loved, mourned, and grieved in advance of their actual loss. It's a genuinely bold authorial choice, and it pays off.
Weaver's trademark humor and irreverence remain intact throughout — this is still very much a book that can pivot from a tender confession to a joke about eyeballs within the same chapter, and that tonal whiplash is precisely what makes her "dark rom-com" label so apt. The spice, too, continues to deliver for most readers, with plenty of dirty talk, brat-taming dynamics, and the kind of intensity that made Tourist Season such a hit — quotes like "Fuck me like I'm unbreakable... but try anyway" have already become fan favorites for good reason.
And then there's that ending. Say what you will about the pacing that precedes it (more on that shortly), but the final act of this book detonates with real force. The La Plume reveal, executed through dramatic irony that lets readers see the danger long before the characters do, creates a genuinely gripping back half, and the cliffhanger — while divisive — has clearly succeeded at its primary job: making readers desperate for book three.
👎 What Doesn't Work as Well
Let's not pretend the pacing issues aren't real, because they are the most consistent complaint across the board, and I share it. A significant portion of Harvest Season — reviewers commonly cite the first 70-80% — moves at a comparatively leisurely pace, with much of the middle section feeling more like connective tissue than forward momentum. As one reader memorably put it, "not much happens til the last 20%." For a book clocking in with the heft this trilogy carries, that's a meaningful structural weakness, and it's fair to wonder, as multiple readers have, whether this story might have worked better as a duology than a trilogy.
Some of Harper's decision-making in the back half also strains credibility relative to the growth she's shown earlier in the book and in Tourist Season. When a heroine has been established as sharp, resourceful, and hard-won in her self-protectiveness, watching her make choices that feel driven more by plot necessity than character logic is a genuine letdown, even if it's forgivable in service of the larger arc.
The secondary cast, while colorful, doesn't always get the depth it deserves this time around — several characters feel present to serve a specific narrative function rather than to exist as fully realized people, which is a step down from the richer supporting cast of book one.
Finally — and this is very much a "your mileage may vary" caveat — the cliffhanger ending, while effective at generating anticipation, is also, by design, deeply unresolved and emotionally punishing. If you are a reader who struggles with waiting a full year for resolution, prepare yourself accordingly.
🎯 Final Verdict
Harvest Season is not the tightest book in the emerging Seasons of Carnage trilogy, and it knows it — this is a sequel doing the unglamorous work of deepening relationships and planting seeds for a finale, and that work occasionally comes at the expense of narrative urgency. But Brynne Weaver's gift for blending gore, humor, and genuine emotional stakes remains undiminished, and when this book hits — Arthur's decline, Nolan's devotion, that gut-punch of an ending — it hits hard enough to make the slower stretches worth wading through.
"You are a villain, Nolan Rhodes," Harper tells him. "And I wouldn't want you any other way." That's more or less how I feel about this book: imperfect, a little indulgent, occasionally frustrating — and I wouldn't want it any other way.
4 out of 5 stars. Bring on book three.
Seasons of Carnage Trilogy #2 | 368 pages | Published June 9, 2026 Audiobook narrated by Samantha Brentmoor & Robert Hatchet Tropes: Small-town romance, fish out of water, grumpy x grumpy, forced proximity, he falls first, touch her/him and die, villain x villain, brat/brat tamer
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