Book Review: Bless Your Heart

By Jami Denison

“Bless your heart” used to be a coded way that genteel southern women told people to go to hell, but now that everyone knows what the phrase really means, it’s not subtle anymore. Similarly, screenwriter Leigh Dunlap’s debut thriller, Bless Your Heart, strips the veneer off of southern charm and lays bare the viciousness beneath. 

When Anderson Tupper, Little League baseball coach and spoiled younger son of a wealthy Atlanta family, is found murdered in his team’s dugout, most of the mothers and fathers of the boys he coached become murder suspects. The women are the “Buckhead Betties”—just as spoiled and entitled as Anderson, their children hate them and their husbands cheat on them. It’s up to single mom police detective Shay Claypool to figure out which woman’s secrets are salacious and which one’s are murderous. 

With so many characters, timelines, and points-of-view, Bless Your Heart is sometimes difficult to follow. There’s the mom who just moved to Buckhead from California and lives in her family’s guesthouse. The mom who bullies all her friends, family, and children. (She’s portrayed as a monster in a size 14, a fatphobic depiction I found particularly troubling.) The third-wife mom married to an 80-something who pays her for blow jobs. (It’s in the pre-nup.) The mom divorced from the victim’s brother. The mom married to a Heisman Trophy winner. And the mom conducting the investigation, who has her own tragic backstory and the fate of a city on her shoulders: If Shay doesn’t figure out who killed Tupper, the suburb of Buckhead might succeed in its plan to separate from Atlanta, taking all its tax monies and hollowing out the capital. 

It’s an ambitious plot, and Dunlap’s pacing has screenwriter fingerprints all over it. What’s missing, ironically, is heart. With so many point-of-view characters, Shay is the only one with rooting value. The rest of the women are either mean, desperate, nasty, or some combination of the three. Sometimes these characterizations dip into parody, but with very little humor, Bless Your Heart doesn’t really work as a satire. 

The ending is jaw-droppingly dark, both with its last-minute motive and the ultimate exposure of the murderer. With no clues building up to these twists, the revelations feel unearned and abrupt, and almost unbelievable. Still, the pace is so swift that the book is almost impossible to put down.

With the news that the 2000s series Desperate Housewives is being rebooted, clearly there’s no slacking of the thirst for suburban mom stories in every genre, even if some of them are mean or nasty. Readers—and viewers--who enjoy these stories will have plenty to choose from.  

Thanks to MB Communications for the book in exchange for an honest review.

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