When a woman nearing 40 decides the reason she and her best friends have not found love, she becomes convinced the reason is a curse.. As she sets out to find out who cursed them, and why, she discovers that curses aren’t always cast from someone else. Sometimes we curse ourselves.
Evangeline Sinclair hates Gone With The Wind. As a good Southern girl, she’s supposed to love it--but she’s not really a girl anymore, she’s nearing forty, and questioning her life choices. After one such choice--taking too much cough syrup (and she’s a pharmacist, she should know better), she’s stricken with an idea that won’t go away: She’s cursed. It’s the only explanation.
After saving a young girl’s life at the expense of her job, Evie is at a crossroads. The idea of a curse just won’t go away--and with her best friend, she’s determined to find and reverse it. But the curse isn’t what she expected, and neither is the new life she finds.
Curses are real, at least in 1824. Delphine and Amaranthe Delacroix are French Creole sisters in a time when marriages are orchestrated business arrangements, not love matches. As the eldest in a family of many, Delphine holds no romantic dreams in her heart. She has spent her young life trying to be the son her father wants instead of the daughter he doesn’t. The only thing she craves more than her father’s approval is her sister’s love, and she will do anything to make Amaranthe happy. Even if that means forcing a slave to cast a love spell on the sisters’ unloving husbands.
What no one expects is that curses--and regret--can live forever.
STATUS : Completed
When a woman at a crossroads in her life inherits a Creole townhouse in the heart of New Orleans’ French Quarter from a mysterious benefactor, she has to navigate the opportunity to create a new life for herself without letting demons from the past get in her way.
Mallory Guerin has had a tough year. Unceremoniously kicked to the curb from her dream job in Paris, she returns home only to have a car accident take her parents within a few months of being back on American soil.
When a New Orleans lawyer contacts her with the news that she has been named the heir of a woman she has never heard of, she’s perplexed. But as she has nothing else to lose, she hops on a plane and flies south for the weekend.
Mallory has no idea what to expect, but not even in her wildest dreams would she have pictured a four-story Creole townhouse in the heart of the French Quarter.
For Mallory, who grew up traveling all over the country with wanderlust-filled parents, the idea of being a property owner is not a good one. The fact that the townhouse comes with generations worth of belongings? Not a selling point.
As Mallory struggles with the opportunity to create a new life for herself, she has to fight the demons of her past to give herself a fighting chance. New family members - some blood, some chosen, and some of a ghostly nature - want to help, but Mallory will have to help herself first.
STATUS: Drafting
When a Southern belle’s dead husband turns out to be very much alive—and engaged to her mortal enemy—she joins with her best friends (and her Grandmama’s ghost) to determine what really happened ten years before and what it means for her carefully curated life— all without throwing anyone in the bayou.
Larger than life in every way, from her figure and penchant for sparkly clothes to her business acumen, Magnolia Charbonnet Rivers owns and operates the Inn at Belle Soeurs, a property located deep in the heart of Louisiana’s bayou country, a place that Magnolia never asked for but now loves. Surrounded by a combination of both found and blood family, including her Grandmama’s ghost, Magnolia has curated a life of contentment despite the devastating death of her college sweetheart, Gus, ten years ago, two months after their elopement.
Magnolia’s peaceful existence is turned six ways to Sunday when she discovers Gus might not be so dead after all. Her nemesis, Veronica Schuyler, who has already spectacularly raised Magnolia’s hackles more than once in the short time Veronica’s been in town, is searching for her AWOL fiancé. Problem is, the missing man is the spitting image of Magnolia’s supposed-to-be-dead husband.
With the discovery that the love of her life has been living it up with someone else, Magnolia realizes the legal ownership of her beloved Belle Soeurs could be at stake, and she doesn’t even want to consider the not-so-tiny problem of life insurance money long since spent. She needs answers, and she’s determined to get them even if it means throwing her Southern belle manners in the bayou to do it.
STATUS: Completed
When a mandatory hurricane evacuation forces a mathematician to detour through her former hometown, she must reconcile with her sisters before a monster of their own making ends them all forever.
McRaney ‘Rae’ Marchand has made a name for herself as one of the top mathematicians working for the US Department of Defense, and prides herself on running her life with complete logic. A new position has required McRaney to relocate herself and her 13yo daughter Amelia to New Orleans - much too close to her former hometown of Blue, Mississippi for comfort.
When a massive hurricane bears down on the city, McRaney and Amelia join the rest of its citizens in a desperate attempt to avoid the largest storm since Katrina, 14 years before. A detour along the evacuation route takes McRaney through Blue and past the one place she thought had been destroyed all those years ago: Marchand House, the century-old boarding house run by McRaney's family since 1895.
Exiled in the aftermath of Katrina, McRaney is shocked to not only see the house still reigning over downtown Blue from its perch at the top of Main Street, but evidence the three sisters who sent her away are still in residence. A spontaneous decision to confront her family leads to a dangerous situation - it isn’t just her sisters who occupy Marchand House. Something else is there, and that something wants McRaney’s daughter for his own.
To defeat this monster created by the Marchands in the winds of Katrina, McRaney will have to put logic aside and return to the wild magic of her childhood to save her daughter, her sisters…and herself.
STATUS: Querying
When a woman loses control of the family curse and steals the soul of a prominent New Orleans musician, she must convince her estranged family to help her end the curse once and for all before she loses everything she holds dear… including her own soul.
Emmy Reeves is a verschlinger - a soul sucker - thanks to a family curse woven in the tangles of her Creole-German heritage. It isn’t really their soul she takes, as much as their fate. Success, happiness, even drama when it’s twisted enough— it’s all delicious to a verschlinger, and very addictive.
Emmy has fought against the addiction for years. She thought she had it under control, until she attends a concert and gets so carried away by the music that she accidentally steals the future of a prominent New Orleans jazz musician. Emmy feels terrible guilt for what she’s done even as she enjoys the euphoria from the stolen fate, but her guilt turns into horror when she learns the musician’s fate has already been promised to someone else: the devil.
Now Emmy has to dig deep within her own family to find someone who can help her end this curse once and for all, not that she has much faith in any of them: an estranged cousin, her little sister who’s a nun at St. Ursulines, and her mama, who abandoned the family two decades before.
Oh, and the three ghosts that haunt Emmy’s family home, who were prostitutes in the famed days of New Orlean’s Storyville and would rather give Emmy sex tips than helpful advice.
It’s a long shot, but one Emmy will have to take unless she wants to lose everything she holds dear…including her own soul.
STATUS: Drafting
The Monsters We Know - Prequel to The Monsters We Are; available November 2024 in All the Promises We Cannot Keep Anthology by The Writer's Sanctuary/Red Herring Society
A Bowl, A Burp, and A Broach - 2019 NYC Midnight Short Story Competition - Honorable Mention
Magnolia Goes to Jail - Prequel to The House of Magnolia; available December 2023 in Meet Me At Midnight Anthology by The Writers Sanctuary/Red Herring Society
