The Crazy Season by Jim Ody

4 Stars from me

I loved this book! I burned through it in a day and was utterly drawn in by the characters and the ‘curse’.

I don’t need to check any other reviews to be pretty damn sure that I am about to echo what other readers will have said – Joel Baxter and The Crazy Season are a delightful mix of Jonathan Creek, the X-Files and maybe a little sprinkling of something like The Inbetweeners!

This cosy mystery thriller has a heady current of hormones running throughout with scores of horny teenagers desperate to get at each other – plus the overt sexualism of the lovely Melody – all of which should have made for a cringefest yet it didn’t, it felt pretty authentic and relevant to the story.

Joel is about as perfect as a man can get, true romantic yet not soppy, genuinely kind and considerate yet not a pushover and he lives in a cottage attached to a lighthouse! All he needs is a couple of cats…

The curse and the teenage suicides could have been harrowing and yet it was told in a very readable way – imparting the right amount for the story without sensationalising the facts and without making it hard to read.

All in all, this is pure entertainment and I look forward to reading more of Joel and Melody’s antics in future books.

My thanks to ZooloosBookTours, Jim Ody and Question Mark Press for letting me be a part of this blog tour.

Blurb: Joel Baxter is infamous for solving weird and bizarre cases that others avoid. So, when he receives an email from a teenage boy Tim saying his town is cursed, he cannot turn it down.

“…I will more than likely be dead when you read this. There is nothing I can do about it. It’s the curse, and we’ve hit The Crazy Season.” Every 20 years, there are a handful of unexplained teenage deaths and it’s started again.

With the help of his straight-talking friend Melody, they set out to get to the bottom of the alleged curse. Everybody in Black Rock has secrets and nobody wants to speak.

The closer they get to truth the more Joel and Melody realise that their involvement is far from coincidental.