The truth never stays buried for four generations of strong, southeast Texas women in Bless Your Heart, a quirky, dark, and wildly exciting novel by Lindy Ryan (Into the Forest: Tales of the Baba Yaga), who also writes romance as Lindy Miller.
In the summer of 1999, action buzzes around the Evans Funeral Parlor, run by 80-year-old widowed matriarch Ducey Evans; her prim and prissy daughter, Lenore; Lenore's meticulous, soft-spoken daughter, Grace; and Grace's teenage daughter, Luna.
After an upstanding local woman dies and the Evans crew prepares her body for burial, the dead gal sits up in her casket and rips out the stitches Ducey "had sewn in to keep her mouth closed." Things grow even spookier when the deputy sheriff drags in the mutilated corpse of another local, who bears strange bite marks on his neck. When this corpse also rises from the dead, Ducey and Lenore recognize the telltale signs of the strigoi. It's been 15 years since Ducey and Lenore experienced the evil, vampire-like spirits who revive after death and whose victims do as well. Now that the strigoi seem to be back, the bighearted Evans family must revisit the past to figure out why they've returned and work together to fight off the bloodsucking demons before they wreak even more havoc.
Snappy characters and dialogue, along with brisk pacing, infuse Ryan's charmingly suspenseful, heart-pounding--at times gruesome--storytelling. Bless Your Heart will hold strong crossover appeal for readers of cozy mysteries, horror, and domestic fiction. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines