Bless Your Heart (A Bless Your Heart Novel, 1) - Softcover

Ryan, Lindy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250888905 ISBN 13: 9781250888907

Publisher: Minotaur Books, 2025

Synopsis

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.

"A gloriously gruesome, compulsively readable debut that is as grizzly as it is clever and heartfelt." - Rachel Harrison

About this title

About the Author

Lindy Ryan is an award-winning author, anthologist, and short-film director whose books and anthologies have received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Library Journal. Several of her projects have been adapted for the screen. Ryan is the current author-in-residence at Rue Morgue. Declared a “champion for women’s voices in horror” by Shelf Awareness, Ryan was named a Publishers Weekly Star Watch Honoree in 2020 and, in 2022, was named one of horror’s most masterful anthology curators. She previously served on the Board of Directors for the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) and currently sits on the Board of Directors for the Brothers Grimm Society of North America. Born and raised in southeast Texas, Ryan currently resides on the East Coast. She is a professor at Rutgers University and a guest faculty mentor in Western Connecticut State University’s Creative Writing MFA program.

Edition details

• Publisher: Minotaur Books
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1250888905
• ISBN 13: 9781250888907
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320