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A crackling mystery-horror novel with big-hearted characters and Southern charm with a bite, Bless Your Heart is a gasp-worthy delight from start to finish from debut author Lindy Ryan.
Rise and shine. The Evans women have some undead to kill.
It's 1999 in Southeast Texas and the Evans women, owners of the only funeral parlor in town, are keeping steady with…normal business. The dead die, you bury them. End of story. That's how Ducey Evans has done it for the last eighty years, and her progeny―Lenore the experimenter and Grace, Lenore's soft-hearted daughter, have run Evans Funeral Parlor for the last fifteen years without drama. Ever since That Godawful Mess that left two bodies in the ground and Grace raising her infant daughter Luna, alone.
But when town gossip Mina Jean Murphy's body is brought in for a regular burial and she rises from the dead instead, it's clear that the Strigoi―the original vampire―are back. And the Evans women are the ones who need to fight back to protect their town.
As more folks in town turn up dead and Deputy Roger Taylor begins asking way too many questions, Ducey, Lenore, Grace, and now Luna, must take up their blades and figure out who is behind the Strigoi's return. As the saying goes, what rises up, must go back down. But as unspoken secrets and revelations spill from the past into the present, the Evans family must face that sometimes, the dead aren't the only things you want to keep buried.
"Incorporating just the right amount of Southern sass, this gruesomely descriptive yet heartrendingly poignant tale will leave horror fans hungry for the next installment." ―Booklist (starred review)
"Ryan melds mystery, horror, and family drama in her sharp solo debut... This has bite." ―Publishers Weekly
"Such a brilliant blend of banter and dread. Authored with the confidence of a storyteller who knows every inch, cadence, and beat of their tale. Instantly cinematic. And if you're anything like me, you're going to wish you were part of the Evans family, working at the Evans Funeral Home, just so you can spend more time with these people. Lindy Ryan is on fire with this book." ―Josh Malerman, New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box and Daphne
"The Evans women have arrived and these southern belle slayers are carving out a spot in our undead hearts. Lindy Ryan has harnessed the charm and horror of a Romero-helmed Steel Magnolias, equal parts Carson McCullers and Bram Stoker. Bless her heart." ―Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Ghost Eaters
This information about Bless Your Heart was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lindy Ryan is an award-winning author and anthologist whose books have received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Library Journal. She also writes seasonal romance as Lindy Miller, with several projects adapted for the screen. Author-in-residence at Rue Morgue and a columnist at BookTrib, Ryan was a Publishers Weekly Star Watch Honoree in 2020 and has been declared a "champion for women's voices in horror" and one of horror's most masterful anthology curators. She is an award-winning professor at Rutgers University, and a guest faculty mentor in Western Connecticut State University's Creative Writing MFA program.
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