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A Murder on the Cajun Prairie
by Jordan LaHaye Fontenot
A compelling blend of true crime and memoir tracing the author's investigation into the kidnapping and murder of her great-grandfather in 1980s Louisiana and the reverberations on her family and community throughout the decades.
On January 16, 1983, Aubrey LaHaye's body was found floating in the Bayou Nezpique. His kidnapping ten days before sparked "the biggest manhunt in the history of Evangeline Parish." But his descendants would hear the story as lore, in whispers of the dreadful day the FBI landed a helicopter in the family's front lawn and set out on horseback to search for the seventy-year-old banker.
Decades later, Aubrey's great-granddaughter Jordan LaHaye Fontenot asked her father, the parish urologist, to tell the full story. He revealed that to this day, every few months, one of his patients will bring up his grandfather's murder, and the man accused of killing him, John Brady Balfa, who remains at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola serving a life sentence. They'll say, in so many words: "Dr. Marcel, I really don't think that Balfa boy killed your granddaddy."
For readers of Maggie Nelson's The Red Parts and Emma Copley Eisenberg's The Third Rainbow Girl, Home of the Happy unravels the layers of suffering borne of this brutal crime—and investigates the mysteries that linger beneath generations of silence. Is it possible that an innocent man languishes in prison, still, wrongly convicted of murdering the author's great-grandfather?
"Riveting and atmospheric, Home of the Happy is also a heartfelt grappling with a trauma in the author's family and her attempts to unravel its secrets once and for all. LaHaye Fontenot's writing is urgent, fueled not just by a desire for justice but by love for her ancestors and the Cajun community of south Louisiana. A must-read for true crime and mystery fans." —Ana Reyes, New York Times bestselling author of The House in the Pines
"No one wants to belong to the murdered great-grandfathers club, but I feel better knowing that Jordan LaHaye Fontenot is here with me, tackling generational trauma and secrecy with tenderness, ethics, and the precision of a surgeon. Home of the Happy is true crime at its best. I simply cannot fathom how LaHaye Fontenot not only conducted her own investigation of her great-grandfather's murder, but braided it with stirring personal and historical anecdotes into a taut and thrilling masterpiece. I absolutely inhaled it." —Ruth Madievsky, bestselling author of All-Night Pharmacy
This information about Home of the Happy was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jordan LaHaye Fontenot's work has appeared in Oxford American, Atlas Obscura, and others. The managing editor of Country Roads magazine, she lives in Lafayette, Louisiana. Home of the Happy is her first book.
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