Bless Your Heart

Ryan’s debut horror mystery is as charming as it is gory. The Evans women have owned the funeral parlor in their small southeast Texas town for generations. With four Evans around—15-year-old Luna and her mother Grace, her grandmother Lenora, and her great-grandmother Ducey—it’s business as usual. That is, until the body of the town gossip reanimates at the parlor, and their neighbors start going missing. Now Luna knows the real reason they own a funeral parlor: to protect the town from the restless dead. But that’s not the only family secret, and as more bodies turn up, the Evans women will have to uncover the secrets they buried long ago. Stephanie Németh-Parker exhibits superb range in this dialogue-heavy story. Each character’s voice is impressively distinguishable, from Ducey sucking on caramel candies to the lip-smacking, slow-talking coroner and the rasping cries of the reanimated dead.