The Gardner

Silas Devereaux is known throughout New Orleans as a man with gifted hands. A masterful restorer of antiques and a holistic healer, he mends broken objects and broken bodies with a quiet, calming grace. His French Quarter studio is a sanctuary for the city's wounded elite, a place where secrets are whispered and pains are soothed.

But Silas guards a darker inheritance. Raised by his Grandmère in the shadowy bayous, he was taught more than the healing properties of the soil; he learned of the land's ancient, insatiable hunger. Some wounds, she whispered, are too deep for medicine. Some blights require a more radical cure.

When Corinne Baptiste, the elegant and traumatized scion of a powerful dynasty, confesses the horrifying truth about her predatory brother, she isn't just seeking solace. She is seeking a solution. She recognizes a kindred darkness in Silas-a willingness to do whatever is necessary to protect a legacy.

Drawn into a dangerous folie à deux, Silas's art of healing twists into a sacred, monstrous duty: to become "the Gardener" and prune the rot from Corinne's world. But as he makes his grim offerings to the hungry bayou, a sharp and perceptive detective, Evangeline LeRoy, begins to connect the disappearances of the city's powerful men to the gentle man who listens to their wives' stories.

Where the Sweet Water Sleeps is a lush, chilling Southern Gothic thriller that explores the fine line between healing and harming, justice and vengeance. It's a story about the stories we tell ourselves to survive and the terrible price of balancing the scales when the land itself is a willing accomplice.

The first novel in the haunting Bayou Gothic series.