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When New York journalist and recently bereaved mother Charlotte "Charlie" Cates begins to experience vivid dreams about children she's sure that she's lost her mind. Yet these are not the nightmares of a grieving parent, she soon realizes. They are messages and warnings that will help Charlie and the children she sees, if only she can make sense of them.
After a little boy in a boat appears in Charlie's dreams asking for her help, Charlie finds herself entangled in a thirty-year-old missing-child case that has never ceased to haunt Louisiana's prestigious Deveau family. Armed with an invitation to Evangeline, the family's sprawling estate, Charlie heads south, where new friendships and an unlikely romance bring healing. But as she uncovers long-buried secrets of love, money, betrayal, and murder, the facts begin to implicate those she most wants to trust - and her visions reveal an evil closer than she could've imagined.
A Southern Gothic mystery debut that combines literary suspense and romance with a mystical twist, The Gates of Evangeline is a story that readers of Gillian Flynn, Kate Atkinson, and Alice Sebold won't be able to put down.
"[H]aunting, heartbreaking, yet ultimately hopeful...Young handles the spectral elements with restraint as her tremendously sympathetic heroine seeks to build a new life after death." - Publishers Weekly
[T]he hothouse atmosphere of Evangeline and the tortuous and tangled motives of its denizens make for an enjoyable puzzle box of a mystery. An eerie but inviting debut." - Kirkus
"[A] dreamy, Southern gothic mystery…Young's novel is powerful and captivating." - New Orleans Magazine
"The Gates of Evangeline is a darkly marvelous debut, a classic whodunnit stitched with otherworldly chills." - Jedediah Berry, author of the Hammett-prize winning The Manual of Detection
"What a delicious book! Gripping and atmospheric - with a heart-stopping twist - The Gates of Evangeline is an imaginative blend of southern gothic, family epic and spooky whodunit." - Jillian Medoff, bestselling author of I Couldn't Love You More and Hunger Point
"...I simply could not stop reading this thrilling, beautifully written Southern Gothic mystery." - David Bell, author of Cemetery Girl and Somebody I Used to Know
"Young's The Gates of Evangeline is a stunning debut novel. A lyrical, haunting, heart-wrenching work of suspense with echoes of du Maurier, Hitchcock, and King." - Reed Farrel Coleman, New York Times bestselling author of Robert B. Parker's The Devil Wins
"Hair-raising and heart-rending, Hester Young's first novel is one of buried shame, children taken too soon, and, ultimately, of immense true love that binds across the mortal divide." - Miranda Beverly-Whittemore, New York Times best-selling author of Bittersweet
This information about The Gates of Evangeline 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.
Hester Young holds a master's degree in English with a creative writing concentration from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and her short stories have appeared in magazines such as Hawai'i Review. Before turning to writing full-time, she worked as a teacher in Arizona and New Hampshire. Young lives in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, with her husband and their two children.
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