Bless Your Heart
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.
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.
Lindy Ryan
Lindy Ryan is a Bram Stoker Awards®-nominated and Silver Falchion Award-winning editor, author, short-film director, and professor. Ryan the current author-in-residence at Rue Morgue, the world’s leading horror culture and entertainment brand, and a regular contributor at Booktrib and LitReactor. Her guest articles and features include NPR, BBC Culture, Irish Times, Daily Mail, and more. She is an active member of the Horror Writers Association (HWA), the International Thriller Writers (ITW), and the Brothers Grimm Society of North America. In 2022, she was named one of horror's most masterful anthology curators, alongside Ellen Datlow and Christopher Golden, and has been declared a "champion for women's voices in horror" by Shelf Awareness (2023). Her animated short film, TRICK OR TREAT, ALISTAIR GRAY, based on her children's book of the same name, won the Grand Prix Award at the 2022 ANMTN Awards.
A Bless Your Heart Novel
A Bless Your Heart Novel consists of one book, and the series is set to expand with the upcoming release of one more book. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.