Raleigh Cheramie knows what normal is. Of course she only gets to stare at it from a distance, but it doesn’t mean she can’t recognize it when she sees it.
Besides from the occasional dead person, life in Barbeaux Bayou is pretty normal. That is until resident traiteur Raleigh Cheramie stumbles across a local dead girl and the top suspects are the people closest to her.
As traiteur to the dead, Raleigh Cheramie should be feeling relieved for the break the dying have given her recently. But as the granddaughter of Barbeaux’s folk healer, she knows it’s a sign of trouble when her unusual genetic inheritance fizzles, especially after a contestant on Barbeaux Bayou’s newest reality show dies in an animal attack straight out of the Cajun folk tales of the area.
Life in Barbeaux Bayou has been fairly normal for Raleigh Cheramie. Family gatherings, weekly visits from her dead Aunt, and waiting for the dead to need her help are all part of her not-so-average life. While volunteering at the local high school, Raleigh’s Traiteur-to-the-dead abilities are put to use when students begin summoning her to their watery graves.Raleigh must untwist the sordid stories of teenagers and uncover the secrets of a cold case to put an end to the untimely demise of Barbeaux’s young.
Wedding bells are ringing in Barbeaux Bayou. But, of course, what would a happy event be without a little visit from the dead? Three visits, to be exact, all wrapped up in the past, present, and future and all at Christmas time when Raleigh Cheramie is supposed to be enjoying the wedding festivities.
Harper Ames believes she finally has her life together, leaving childhood tragedy in the past where it rightfully belongs. But with an unforeseen twist of luck, she lands right back in her childhood home where her granddaddy is literally trying to dig up one-hundred-fifty-year-old family secrets in the backyard.
Sissy Ames has been driven to succeed her entire life. On her own, she’s turned her Bittersweet Café into a success, and she’s rebuilt a friendship with her cousin Harper after years of going it alone, but her past bad judgement in trusting Hunter Wells during their relationship continues to cast shadows on the future she’s trying to build for herself.
After making a mess of her life, Lauren Ames retreats to her grandparents’ home just in time to begrudgingly help with her cousin’s wedding. After years of controlling relationships, she’s hoping for a chance to heal, to escape — she’s not certain what. But the man she’d spent hours spilling all her darkest secrets to the last time she’d been exiled to her grandparents’ house keeps drawing her in. Can she trust herself again?
After a childhood of nightmares and parental abandonment, Angelica Acacia has learned how to pretend to be normal and hide her strange inhuman abilities from others. But a series of events before her twenty-first birthday spurs an obsessive desire to discover the truth behind her mother’s long ago disappearance. She remembers little else but the strange man that hunted them in her nightmares prompting the mother she’d called Lily to leave her on her grandmother’s front porch.