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BLACK-EYED SUSANS by Julia Heaberlin

"One novel you will not want to miss this year."

By: Julia Heaberlin

Genres: Suspense

Posted: August 6, 2015

It would be very cliché to say that this is the best suspense novel I have read this year, so I'll just say it surpasses all the rest I have read in a long time. BLACK- EYED SUSANS by Julia Heaberlin will have "The Susans" talking to me in my head probably for a while. I love that Heaberlin was able to make you second guess your own thoughts about where the story is going and at the end she takes you in a direction you never thought it would go. Julia Heaberlin hits a topic like abduction of young women in a world where such devastation is all but too real. However, this novel ends like a Hitchcock's story and I love it!

Tessa is missing more than a day of her life that she can't remember. That is because she was left to die in a grave with three other victims' remains. They are all known as the Black-Eyed Susans because their bodies were covered with a blanket of the flowers. After the girls were discovered, everything points to one man who is left on death row.

Now its years later and Tessa has her own teenage daughter she is raising as a single mom and it seems her nightmares are not over. New events through the years make her realize that they have the wrong man and the days are numbered until his execution.

This is certainly the most intense suspense novel I have read. I love the research that has gone into such a story, making it close to real as possible. Julia Heaberlin covers all angles of such an abduction, from the forensics to the psychological effects that her character faces. BLACK-EYED SUSANS is one novel you will not want to miss this year. I highly recommend that you pick it up and set aside the time for yourself to indulge in it because you will not be able to put it down.

Book Summary

For fans of Laura Lippman and Gillian Flynn comes an electrifying novel of stunning psychological suspense.

I am the star of screaming headlines and campfire ghost stories. I am one of the four Black-Eyed Susans. The lucky one.

As a sixteen-year-old, Tessa Cartwright was found in a Texas field, barely alive amid a scattering of bones, with only fragments of memory as to how she got there. Ever since, the press has pursued her as the lone surviving “Black-Eyed Susan,” the nickname given to the murder victims because of the yellow carpet of wildflowers that flourished above their shared grave. Tessa’s testimony about those tragic hours put a man on death row.

Now, almost two decades later, Tessa is an artist and single mother. In the desolate cold of February, she is shocked to discover a freshly planted patch of black-eyed susans—a summertime bloom—just outside her bedroom window. Terrified at the implications—that she sent the wrong man to prison and the real killer remains at large—Tessa turns to the lawyers working to exonerate the man awaiting execution. But the flowers alone are not proof enough, and the forensic investigation of the still-unidentified bones is progressing too slowly. An innocent life hangs in the balance. The legal team appeals to Tessa to undergo hypnosis to retrieve lost memories—and to share the drawings she produced as part of an experimental therapy shortly after her rescue.

What they don’t know is that Tessa and the scared, fragile girl she was have built a fortress of secrets. As the clock ticks toward the execution, Tessa fears for her sanity, but even more for the safety of her teenaged daughter. Is a serial killer still roaming free, taunting Tessa with a trail of clues? She has no choice but to confront old ghosts and lingering nightmares to finally discover what really happened that night.

Shocking, intense, and utterly original, Black-Eyed Susans is a dazzling psychological thriller, seamlessly weaving past and present in a searing tale of a young woman whose harrowing memories remain in a field of flowers—as a killer makes a chilling return to his garden.

Read an Excerpt

Black-Eyed Susans by Julia Heaberlin

Black-Eyed Susans

by: Julia Heaberlin

Ballantine
August 1, 2015
On Sale: August 11, 2015
Featuring: Tessa Cartwright
368 pages
ISBN: 0804177996
EAN: 9780804177993
Kindle: B00P5557PI
Hardcover / e-Book

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