The first book in a duology, this propulsive and wickedly funny mystery-horror novel from a well-connected author has huge commercial appeal.

BLESS YOUR HEART
by Lindy Ryan
Minotaur Books, April 2024)

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. A crackling mystery-horror novel with big-hearted characters and blood-soaked Southern charm, Bless Your Heart is a gasp-worthy delight from start to finish.

Lindy Ryan is a Bram Stoker Awards®-nominated and award-winning editor, author, director, and professor. Ryan served from 2020 to 2022 on the Board of Directors for the Independent Book Publishers Association and was named one of Publishers Weekly‘s 2020 Star Watch Honorees. Currently, she is the co-chair of the Horror Writers Association Publishers Council. Ryan is a regular contributor at Rue Morgue, the world’s leading horror culture and entertainment brand, Booktrib, and LitReactor. Her articles and features have appeared on NPR, BBC Culture, Irish Times, Daily Mail, and more. In 2022, she was named one of horror’s most masterful anthology curators and has been declared a « champion for women’s voices in horror » by Shelf Awareness (2023).