Published: April 9, 2024
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Series: Bless Your Heart #1
Genre: Horror
Pages: 301 (Kindle)
My Rating: 4 Stars
A copy of this book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
Synopsis:
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 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.
I never, ever could have predicted how much I actually loved this weird little book. Bless Your Heart is set in Texas, 1999, and follows the women of the Evans family. The Evans women have been running the local funeral home for generations and as part of this gig, they also make sure anybody who happens to start turning into a strigoi (a type of vampire) after death becomes permanently dead. This can happen randomly to those who’ve had a particularly violent death, but this outbreak seems to be caused by something darker and more nefarious – a master strigoi.
This is a multi-POV story and the reader gets to see things from the perspective of each of the Evans women, the sheriff, and one of the deputies. There are a few other POVs thrown in for dramatic effect, but they’re one-offs. The Evans women are a sassy, strong bunch and they’re hard not to love from the hard candy addicted matriarch Ducey, all the way to the dramatic teenager Luna. The sheriff is a gruff old drunk who’s seen too much and just wants his small town to be nice and normal and the Evans women prevent this, much to his chagrin. And then the deputy, Roger Taylor, who has his eye on Grace Evans, gets dragged into all the mess too and he’s unfortunately the one finding all the bodies. I really enjoyed each and every one of the characters and what they brought to the story. Even the side characters that didn’t get much page time were great and I suspect they might play a more important role in the next installment.
Bless Your Heart is certainly not for the faint of heart. It’s gory and the strigoi are a disturbing blend of vampire and zombie traits that will leave you thinking twice about eating whilst reading this book. This isn’t a suspenseful horror story – it’s a bloody one, but I think the somewhat humorous and personal elements balance this out nicely. It’ll be easy to tell if this is going to be your cup of tea early in the story, as the Evans ladies have to dispatch not one but two recently undeceased that they’ve lived and worked alongside their entire lives. Nothing like a good trocar to the heart followed by a swift cremation!
I initially wasn’t really crazy about the idea of Bless Your Heart being the start of a series because I thought it was going to be a standalone, but by the end I was actually pretty delighted by the idea of returning to this world! It seems like Luna will be the central character in the next installment as she explores the heritage of the Evans women. Overall, I had a blast reading this book and couldn’t put it down. I’d highly recommend this, especially for folks who enjoyed Grady Hendrix’s book The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires.
Powder & Page 
I just started this yesterday and it’s really good! I love the idea of these women doing all sorts of non traditional things, and the dialog is very funny.
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