Purchase

Amazon

Kindle

Barnes & Noble

Kobo

Apple Books

Google Play

Books-A-Million

Indie BookShop

Add to Wish List

Also by Julia Heaberlin:

Night Will Find You, June 2024
Trade Paperback / e-Book
Night Will Find You, June 2023
Hardcover / e-Book
We Are All the Same in the Dark, August 2020
Hardcover / e-Book
Paper Ghosts, May 2018
Hardcover / e-Book
Black-Eyed Susans, August 2015
Hardcover / e-Book
Playing Dead, June 2012
Trade Size / e-Book

BLACK-EYED SUSANS
By: Julia Heaberlin

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

Suspense

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

Media Buzz

Good Morning Texas - Buy The Book - September 17, 2021