Simmering tensions in a family of Australian expats newly living in L.A. explode when their daughter commits a crime she can’t remember on a big night out, and they all become complicit in the cover up…
THE ONES WE LOVE
by Anna Snoekstra
Dutton, Spring 2025
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)
Since the morning after the party – the one Liv can’t remember, the one that left her covered in bruises – there’s been a padlock on the door of her bedroom. Her parents said they found mold and it needs to be decontaminated, but they’re acting kind of strange. And her friend Leilani isn’t answering her texts, so maybe Liv did get a little out of control that night. Sharing a room with her brother Cas for a while isn’t the end of the world, as long as he doesn’t tell their parents that she’s started sleepwalking. They’re already worried enough.
Janus brought his family from Australia to LA to chase his dream of turning his bestselling novel into a screenplay. Yeah, money is tight, but he’s sure THIS rewrite is the one. He knows he let his wife down with that Liv situation, and he can’t let her down again.
Kay wasn’t sure she wanted to be a mother when she got pregnant with Liv, but she gave up everything for her daughter and then her son, Casper, as well. She’ll do whatever she has to do to take care of her kids. Her marriage, though, is a different story. And the neighbors – well, they’ll just have to be more careful.
All Cas wanted was to go home for the summer – to Australia, his real home. But his parents are making him stay in LA, AND he has to share a room with his sister. Mold? He doesn’t believe it. Since Cas’s plans were ruined, he might as well find out the truth about the padlock. And whatever it is that no one is telling him.
Anna Snoekstra’s earlier novels have been translated into fifteen languages and she is a bestseller in her homeland of Australia. She is also the creator and writer of The Ridge, a television series in development with Lucky Chap Entertainment and CreateNSW. Her first novel, Only Daughter, has been optioned by Universal Studios and Working Title, and is now being adapted by Anna into a feature film with Fictious (In Vitro). In addition, Anna writes about culture and creative process for The Guardian, Crimereads, Lindsay, HERE Magazine, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Saturday Paper, and teaches fiction writing at RMIT University in Melbourne.
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.
For most of her life, Izzy has been looking forward to fulfilling her mother’s dream of studying abroad in Italy. Going into her senior year, Izzy is counting down the days until she can leave her humdrum life behind, until Alberto, a handsome and mysterious Italian exchange student shows up for his stay with her family. Now life in her hometown doesn’t seem so drab, as Izzy, and everyone else, is immediately charmed by Alberto and his irresistible accent.
Hope is dangerous. Love is deadly.
It’s almost spring break in the university town of Forest, North Carolina. Campus is deserted and the temperature is dropping. Someone is watching and waiting. Someone who has killed before plans to kill again.