Midnight Crossroad by Charlaine Harris

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 Davy Road. It’s a pretty standard dried-up western town.

There’s a pawnshop (someone lives in the basement and is seen only at night). There’s a diner (people who are just passing through tend not to linger). And there’s new resident Manfred Bernardo, who thinks he’s found the perfect place to work in private (and who has secrets of his own).

Stop at the one traffic light in town, and everything looks normal. Stay awhile, and learn the truth...

The inhabitants of Midnight, Texas, have all chosen the derelict little town for its size and its ­quietness—it’s a great place to hide. But what are they hiding from? Bobo Winthrop, proprietor of the local pawn shop, seems to know a little bit about everyone in town, and they all have secrets. The new tenant in the basement of the pawn shop only comes out after dark, while New Age instructor Fiji Cavanaugh openly claims to be a witch and can talk to her cat, Mr. Snuggly. 

When Bobo’s girlfriend, Aubrey, disappears, people start to ask too many questions, and everyone begins to fear that their pasts will be exposed, along with Aubrey’s.


Is this really the best selling author of the Southern Vampire Mysteries (the later True Blood entries should be forgotten): "She is very pretty"... "The new guy picks slaw and an apple"...

What fluid writing and vivid descriptions, don't you agree? The author's writing is clinical, cold, many details are used on descriptions of things that add zero to the story; Harris literally spends the first part of the book introducing us to every single person who lives in the Hamlet of Midnight, Texas. She even goes into detail about the layout of where several secondary characters live in relation to one of the main characters. The abundance of details means that nothing interesting happens until we're past the book's halfway mark, and by that point I just didn't care about any of the characters, their relationships with each other, or what happened to them.

I think Harris has wrote this book imaging how everything would look on screen foremost on her mind, like the later Southern Vampire Mysteries/True Blood books. But whilst I do think that it could maybe work on TV, as a book it is painfully slow and dry, with cardboard characters I couldn't begin to care about. I literally had to force myself to finish reading it.


Kindle - £6.49
Hardcover - £15.19
Paperback [rd; 2nd April 2015] - £8.99