Bodies Under the Bluebonnets

When Sara Matthews moves to China Grove, Texas, looking for a quiet place to write, she finds a photograph the previous owners left behind: two girls she doesn’t recognize, smiling the kind of smile she learned to wear herself, a long time ago, in a life she doesn’t talk about.Nobody in China Grove wants to talk about the girls.Not Jim and Sue Sutter, who’ve owned the town’s watering hole for thirty years, keeping the bar and the community that gathers there running through weekends of live music, Sunday football, and the town’s peculiar tradition of Chicken Sh*t Bingo. Not Dean Williams, the police chief who took the job after leaving San Antonio and who has learned when to ask a question and when to let one sit. Not the regulars who’ve been sitting on the same bar stools since before Sara arrived. Everyone in China Grove knows something. No one is saying what.Sara has spent a lifetime reading rooms like this one. She knows what silence means, and what a town looks like when it has decided together not to ask a question. Most of all, she knows what happens to women whose stories get held in that silence until they disappear.The photograph is only the beginning. As Sara becomes part of the town - taking her stool at Mr. Jim’s, learning who speaks and who doesn’t, listening more than she talks - the shape of a decades-old absence begins to emerge. Not one girl. Not two. A pattern that stretches back forty years, quietly kept by a community that has agreed, without ever saying so, not to look at it directly.What she uncovers is a truth China Grove has been holding since before most of its current residents were born. And what she does with that truth will change what the town has to reckon with, and what Sara herself is willing to carry.Bodies Under the Bluebonnets is a literary mystery about small-town silence, the specific weight of what communities agree not to see, and the particular courage it takes for a woman with her own history of survival to ask the questions no one else will.From the internationally award-winning author of Success Is the Best Revenge and Sara’s Redemption comes the first book in a new Texas mystery series set in the rural area outside San Antonio.Book One of the China Grove Mysteries. For readers of Louise Penny, Attica Locke, and William Kent Krueger. 6