What The Bayou Keeps

When the body of Renard Arceneaux is pulled from the bayou at the edge of his family's estate, Detective Callum Pruitt is sent from New Orleans to solve the case quietly. The quietly part proves impossible.

The problem is Evangeline Arceneaux — Renard's youngest daughter, the one who stayed behind while her siblings escaped. For fifteen years she has tended her dead mother's garden, lived inside the crumbling family house, and documented every sin committed within its walls in a journal hidden behind a loose board in the library. She knows who killed her father. She also knows that the truth will destroy the one person in Lacombe Parish she has ever loved — and implicate herself in something she didn't do but cannot prove she didn't.

Callum has spent fifteen years watching the guilty walk free. He came to this parish expecting a manageable case. He did not expect Evangeline Arceneaux.

Set deep in the Louisiana bayou country, where Spanish moss filters the light into something amber and suspect and the old families have been keeping each other's secrets for two hundred years, What the Bayou Keeps is a slow-burn Gothic romance about truth, complicity, and what it costs to finally tell the one story you've been protecting all your life.

By Emily Ellison.