Bless Your Heart by Lindy Ryan #bookreview #horror #paranormal #mystery

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Title: Bless Your Heart

Author: Lindy Ryan

Publisher: Minotaur Books 

Publication Date: April 9, 2024

Page Count:  301

My rating: 3 1/2 stars

About the book:

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.

Bless Your Heart by Lindy Ryan is the first book in a new series by the same title, Bless You Heart. This series is a mix of humorous horror with a murder mystery underneath and does tell the story by changing the point of view between multiple characters in the book.

The Evans Funeral Parlor is a family business and for years the Evans woman have been running it without incident. Things have been running so smoothly for the Evan’s family that teenager, Luna, doesn’t even know the real business that the family take care of behind the door of the funeral parlor.

The day has come however for all of the four generations of Evans women to jump right back into business when the body of Mina Jean Murphy is brought to the parlor and she seems to be waking right back up. This is where Luna learns her heritage and just how to really kill an ancient Strigoi, an original vampire.

Bless Your Heart by Lindy Ryan is sort of like taking the quirkiness and eccentricities of a humorous cozy mystery and combining it with some light horror. Yes, there are murderous vampires on the loose but there’s also some laughs and certainly an interesting family at the center of the story. I did rate this first book at three and a half stars thinking there was a lot thrown into the mix for the first book and I felt I could’ve gotten to know the characters a bit better but I have a feeling that the series will only continue to grow on me as it continues on.

I received an advance copy from the publisher via NetGalley.

Find this book online:

Goodreads  /  Amazon

About the author:

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.