Bless Your Heart

The Evans women have run the only funeral parlor in a Southeast Texas town for eighty years. Ducey, her daughter Lenore and granddaughter Grace keep the business steady and quiet, apart from one old family scandal that left Grace raising her daughter, Luna, on her own. The year is 1999.

The quiet ends when Mina Jean Murphy, the town gossip, sits up on the embalming table after she has died. Her return is proof that the Strigoi, the original vampires, are back.

More bodies turn up, and a local deputy begins asking questions the family cannot afford to answer. Four generations of Evans women take up their blades to find whatever is raising the dead. Along the way they have to face secrets they buried long ago.

This is Southern Gothic horror with a comic streak. The violence is graphic and bloody, and it sits beside sharp Southern wit and the warmth of a close, multi-generational family. It is written for adult readers who want their horror funny and gory. The novel is a Bram Stoker Award finalist and opens a series.