3 stars

This is such a sweet series and I've been loving all of these guys' stories! This book wasn't my favourite of the bunch, but it was a very sweet story nonetheless.

This book is based around the best holiday ever, Halloween! 🎃🎃 And it was fun to read about the pranks that occur between Bram and Zachary and their shenanigans and to see two creative characters at work!

Thank you to NetGalley and Harlequin for the earc in return for an honest review.

This was a sweet, fast little romance with sympathetic characters - I especially liked Zachary, awkward, introverted, and so accustomed to being dumped that he doesn't even consider the possibility that a relationship might actually work out. I also like the clash of a boyfriend who loves horror and one who's very easily scared and upset, because it is a conflict that is very manageable by any couple with a reasonable amount of mutual respect. This is a sweet, cozy, low-stakes romance that is the literary equivalent of eating chocolate pudding.

The Garnet Run series is one of my ultimate comfort reads, so I've been HIGHLY anticipating this last installment. And I did enjoy it A LOT, but maybe my expectations were slightly too high, but it didn't complete live up to the first three books for me.

Don't get me wrong, it was great: I loved the characters, I loved the story, I loved seeing the previous main characters again. But it just didn't hit as close to home for me emotionally as the other books.

At first, we are told that Bram finds Zachary slightly unfriendly, but frankly, I didn't really see why. It's not really shown on the page, so it didn't really come across. I thought he was being polite and friendly in his own way, but maybe that's because he's autistic-coded and I'm autistic.

I also thought the prank war felt kind of... half hearted. I wanted a little more out of it, especially because, like I said, the rivalry didn't really come across. It just felt like two friends pulling some friendly pranks on each other.

And like I said, Zachary is autistic-coded, and where I loved this in Corbin Wale by the same author, I didn't love it as much here. As an autistic person, I didn't love the way Zachary was treated sometimes like he didn't know his own mind, and I also just wish we could have more canon autistic characters instead of them being autistic-coded.

So I definitely had some qualms with this book and that's maybe why I enjoyed it slightly less. But I did love Bram and Zachary as characters, and I would definitely reread this installment as well!