Bea Reviews Midnight Crossroad by Charlaine Harris

Series: Midnight, Texas, #1
Publisher: Ace Books
Source: the publisher in exchange for an honest review
Release Date: July 4th, 2017
Buying Links: Amazon* | Book Depository* | iTunes* | Barnes & Noble
* affiliate links; the blog receives a small commission from purchases made through these links.

Blurb from goodreads:

Get ready for the new drama Midnight, Texas on NBC with the first book in Charlaine Harris' paranormal mystery series about a small town where only outsiders fit in...

Welcome to Midnight, Texas, a town with many boarded-up windows and few full-time inhabitants, located at the crossing of Witch Light Road and the Davy highway. It's a pretty standard dried-up western town.

There's a pawnshop with three residents. One is seen only at night. There's a diner, but people stopping there tend not to linger. There's a newcomer, Manfred Bernardo, who just wants to work hard and blend in. But Manfred has secrets of his own.

My Thoughts:

So, this book originally released several years ago but now it's been made into a TV series, premiering July 24th, and the publisher has re-released the book with a cover featuring the TV cast. I've seen a trailer for the show and was not impressed, particularly as I enjoyed the book.

"Midnight Crossroad" is about a town of misfits, people who for one reason or another don't fit in contemporary American society. They're gravitated to Midnight and made a home there. An unspoken rule is that you don't ask questions. The residents decide if and how much personal information they will share. And while some of the residents are ordinary humans, most are not.
Harris reels the reader in slowly, giving us just information to keep us satisfied while still keeping secrets. And there are plenty of secrets! Some are revealed in this book but many are not. And those secrets give us small mysteries to go along with the story's core mystery. One secret we didn't get an answer to is why exactly Manfred moved to this small Texas town. You stand out more in a small community so if he wanted to go unnoticed and blend in, his thinking was off. As it turns out, he fits in pretty well but he didn't know that when he moved there.

A lot happens in this quiet, forgotten town of about a dozen residents - murder, romance,
family drama, kidnapping, witch craft, etc. We see it all happen through multiple POVs, which was a little disconcerting at times. That did make it a little harder to connect with some of the characters, which was unfortunate given the oddness of some of them. But eventually I did connect and I was cheering for the residents. 

It took me a little while to get into the story but slowly Harris lured me in and soon I was hooked. In fact, as soon as I finished it, I picked up book 2, "Day Shift", which was still sitting in my TBR pile from several years ago and read that, then downloaded book 3, "Night Watch" to my Kindle and read it. Binge read FTW!

Some of the characters in the book appeared in other books by Harris; her Sookie Stackhouse series (also made into a TV show), the Harper Connelly series, and the Lily Bard series. If you haven't read those, no problem. The book works fine as a stand alone; no familiarity with the other series' is necessary.

 Harris told a compelling story (after a slow start) that gave us quirky characters, small town Southern flavor, mysteries galore, humor, and action with a helping of the supernatural and some politics. It got off to a slow start but then it grabbed me and didn't let go.