Lori Rader-Day on "Wreck Your Heart"

ABOUT THE BOOK:

From award-winning author Lori Rader-Day, Wreck Your Heart is an engaging, “wisecracking and wonderful” (Ann Cleeves) crime novel with a big heart, about a country and midwestern singer out to catch her big break before family—or murder—wrecks everything.

Dahlia “Doll” Devine had the kind of hardscrabble beginning that could launch a thousand broken-hearted country songs, but now she’s the star of her own stage at McPhee’s Tavern. As part of Chicago’s—yes, Chicago’s—country music scene, Dahlia is an up-and-coming singer in spangles and boots of classic country tunes. Up and coming, that is, until her boyfriend Joey up and went, taking the rent money with him.

So Dahlia is back to square one, relying on Alex McPhee—again. Alex helped her out of a bad situation when she was a kid living rough with her mother. Now he’s part landlord, part band booster, all-around rescuer. It’s just that Dahlia wishes she didn’t keep giving him reasons to have to do it.

Just as Dahlia suspects she’s scraped rock bottom, the mother she hasn’t spoken to in twenty years shows up with something to say. The next morning, a distraught young woman arrives at the bar, asking after her missing mother—Dahlia’s mother, too, even if the missing suburban PTA mom the girl describes sounds pretty different from the one who let Dahlia down all those years ago.

Though no one is using the word sister any time soon, Dahlia lets herself be drawn into reuniting the family that might have been hers. But when a body is discovered outside McPhee’s Tavern, the crime threatens not just the place Dahlia has made into a home, but everything she’s believed about her past, her dreams for the future, and the people she was just, maybe, beginning to let into her heart.

ABOUT LORI RADER-DAY:

Lori Rader-Day is the Edgar® Award-nominated and Agatha, Anthony, and Mary Higgins Clark award-winning author of Wreck Your Heart, The Death of Us, Death at Greenway, The Lucky One, Under a Dark Sky, The Day I Died, Little Pretty Things, and The Black Hour. She lives in Chicago, where she is co-chair of the mystery readers’ festival Midwest Mystery Conference and served as 2019-2020 national president of Sisters in Crime. She teaches creative writing for Northwestern University’s School of Professional Studies.

ABOUT ANGELA JACKSON-BROWN:

Angela Jackson-Brown is an award-winning writer, poet, playwright, and the Director of Creative Writing at Indiana University Bloomington. She also teaches in the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, KY. She is the author of Drinking From a Bitter Cup, House Repairs, When Stars Rain Down, The Light Always Breaks, Homeward, and Untethered. House Repairs won the 2021 Alabama Library Association Poetry Award. When Stars Rain Down was a finalist for the 2021 Langum Prize, longlisted for the Granum Foundation Award, and shortlisted for the 2022 Indiana Authors Award. Homeward was shortlisted in 2024.