Title: Midnight Crossroad (Midnight, Texas #1)
Author: Charlaine Harris
Read by: Susan Bennett
Category: Mystery, Paranormal
Audio published: May 6, 2014 by Recorded Books
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Add: Goodreads
Purchase: Audible | Amazon | Book Depository
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…
I am not a die-hard Charlaine Harris fan. I got bored of her Sookie books and read maybe one in her Aurora Teagarden series. I picked up midnight Crossroad because it sounded fun enough and I didn’t really have anything I was desperate to listen to. It’s also the first in a trilogy and I usually stay interested enough for three books, just not 5 or 6 or 7, with a few rare exceptions. This turned out to be an enjoyable, light book, not outstanding but entertaining.
Midnight, Texas is full of misfits who someone all fit together. I guess if you had read some of her other book some of the characters would be familiar to you, but they weren’t to me. The local folks include a vampire, a witch, a mysterious woman who’s secret I’m not sure of, the gay couple who run the salon/antique shop, the kind of creepy Reverend, the couple who run the diner and the family at the gas station. And Manfred, the new guy, an internet psychic. None of them are terribly compelling, but they’re all kind of interesting. I didn’t really care about them, but passing the time listening to what was going on in their tiny town was a nice enough way to spend an afternoon.
There’s the big mystery – the pawn shop owner’s ex-girlfriend, who he had thought left him, is found dead down by the river. Who killed her? But since everyone has his or her own secrets is tough to see what’s actually going on. I liked the mix of paranormal and mystery. I’m interested enough to read the next in the series when it comes out, get to the characters better, see who else’s secrets are exposed.
I listed to the audio and I do think Susan Bennett as reader added something to it for me. I may have gotten a bit bored actually reading it in print, but she kept the story interesting, the characters easily differentiated, and made it easy to know who’s viewpoint we were seeing events from. Her tone didn’t give away the bad guy as narrators sometimes do.
About Charlaine Harris
Charlaine Harris is a New York Times bestselling author who has been writing mysteries for thirty years. She was born and raised in the Mississippi River Delta area of the United States. She now lives in southern Arkansas with her husband and three children. Though her early work consisted largely of poems about ghosts and, later, teenage angst, she began writing plays when she attended Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. She began to write books a few years later. Her later books have been in the urban fantasy genre.
Sounds good to me 😀
I really liked the idea of this one and getting to see some of the characters again but whew after the way the Sookie ones ended I’ve been real nervous about trying another. It does sound good though. I’ll have to see if they have it at our library 🙂
I got bored about 3 in to the Sookie series.
I read the first True Blood book, and that was enough for me. This sounds like something in the same universe, just different location.