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Unabridged Digital Audiobook
Runtime: 10 hours, 49 minutes
Read by Stephanie Németh-Parker
Every family has their own inside jokes, their own stories, and even their own secrets. But when it comes to the quirky family in the audio edition of Bless Your Heart by author Lindy Ryan, their family secrets are keeping the rest of the town safe.
The story introduces the Evans family: four generations of women who run the only funeral parlor in a small town in Southeast Texas. While the town’s residents see the Evans women as odd for their rather chosen vocation, they only know half of the story. Not only are the Evans women responsible for burying the town’s dead, but they’re also responsible for the restless dead—the Strigoi—the ones who refuse to stay dead. And while things have been quiet in town for the last 15 years, all that changes when the recently-deceased town gossip begins to rise.
One by one, town members start going missing—or they’re killed in the most horrifying of ways. And while Deputy Roger Taylor tries to make sense of what’s going on in his town, he keeps coming back to the Evans family—to these eccentric women who seem to know more than they’re letting on. The Evans women have been through so much—and they’ve seen so much, too. Yet their quirks—and their dedication to one another—make them incredibly lovable. They’re the kind of characters that readers will enjoy getting to know.
There’s just something completely out of the ordinary about this debut novel, with its unexpected mix of small-town Southern charm and gruesome undead violence. While most authors would commit to a tone—either sticking with the coziness and downplaying the violence or sticking with the violence and making the characters and setting darker and more serious—Lindy Ryan somehow manages to give them the right balance to create a thriller that’s just as charming as it is grisly. Admittedly, not all of the pieces here come together perfectly—and not all of the questions have answers—but the author makes it work in a way that’s satisfying in the end.
If you’re okay with some mutilated bodies finding their way into your cozy small-town mystery, you might just enjoy the unusual genre mashup of Bless Your Heart. It’s an oddly lovable thriller with the kind of no-nonsense characters that you’d want by your side if the dead ever started to rise.
Listen to the review on Shelf Discovery:
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