Bless Your Heart

I received this book for free from the publisher. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Bless Your Heart by Lindy Ryan
Narrator: Stephanie Nemeth-Parker
Series: Bless Your Heart #1
Published by Macmillan Audio, Minotaur Books on April 9, 2024
Genres: Fiction / Horror
Length: 10 hours 49 minutes
Pages: 304
Format: ARC, Audiobook
Source: Publisher
Goodreads
Amazon | Audible | B&N | Kobo | Libro.fm

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

This was a fun, entertaining read full of Southern charm and a bit of vampire hunting. The four generations of Evans women were all great characters and I enjoyed getting to know each of them. I was hooked early in the book and couldn’t wait to see how things would work out in the end. Some pretty big surprises were worked into the story making the book almost impossible to put down.

The Evans family runs the local funeral parlor which works out perfectly in their small Southern town since every once in a while the dead rise after a while. When some other residents go missing, the women know that they need to get a handle on things as soon as possible. The youngest member of the family, Luna, is just learning what the family does and it is a big adjustment.

I listened to the audiobook and thought Stephanie Nementh-Parker did a fantastic job with this story. She was able to bring all of the characters in the story to life and I loved the Southern accent that she used which helped to give the characters their personality. I thought that she added just the right amount of emotion to her reading to keep the story very interesting. I am certain that the narrator’s performance added to my overall enjoyment of the story.

I would recommend this book to others. I found it to be a very enjoyable read that kept me on my toes. I enjoyed getting to know the women of the Evans family and hope to read more of this author’s work very soon.

I received a review copy of this book from Macmillan Audio and Minotaur Books.

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