The Song of the Blue Bottle Tree

Hayford debuts with a poignant tale of ghosts and found family. In 1967, Genevieve Charbonneau has just left the circus where she worked following a stint in an Alabama psychiatric hospital, having been committed because of her ability to communicate with ghosts. Now, yearning for her ancestral home in Arkansas, she travels aimlessly through Louisiana, “sleeping most nights in some cemetery or another.” One morning, Genevieve meets Vietnam War veteran Mercer Ives, who’s also on the way to Arkansas, and the pair complete the journey by motorcycle. There, she meets Mercer’s mother, Wreath, who recognizes her as a distant cousin. She and Mercer visit the site where her grandmother’s home once stood, now overgrown with pine trees and vines, which they pick through with help from the ghost of an American soldier killed in Vietnam, who has been benevolently haunting Mercer. Genevieve witnesses Wreath’s preacher husband, John Luther, physically abusing Wreath, and then learns that he is also sexually abusing a young female parishioner. Afterward, Genevieve plots ways to expose John Luther, setting in motion a dramatic chain of events. Hayford seamlessly weaves the supernatural elements with lush details of the Southern landscape. Readers are in for a treat. Agent: John Talbot, Talbot Fortune Agency. (Apr.)