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 backcover didn't give much away as to what the book contains, but I was surprised to recognize several characters. Main character Manfred originates from The Harper Connelly Mysteries and Bobo Winthrop stems from The Lily Bard books. Having read both other series by Harris, it was really fun to know the background story of those characters (though not necessary for understanding this book). As far as I know Harris doesn't draw anything directly from The Sookie Stackhouse books, but there are a lot of supernatural elements. To the point of extreme.

I think the plot was less crucial to the book than showing off all the different special characters. I liked it well enough, but like with the two other series (Harper and Lily) it's not groundbreaking or very advanced. Things are very straight forward - but saying that I still really enjoyed it. Harris' books remains one of my guilty pleasures. Maybe because the simplicity of it coupled with an interesting plot and decently written text always makes her books easy to read and enjoyable.

I did find this book exceptionally odd though, compared to her previous books. I loved that it's set in our modern day (the others are 5-18 years old), but that cannot outweigh the oddness of the plot that seems a bit all over the place, the random selection of characters and most of all; the oddness of the ending. Which just ended. In an odd way. That left me looking like this o__O

MIDNIGHT CROSSROAD Midnight, Texas #1 by Charlaine Harris ISBN13: 9780425263150 305 pages / Published in 2014

Review by Iben Jakobsen, BoB, 2014