A riveting blend of true crime and memoir tracing the authorâs investigation into the kidnapping and murder of her great-grandfather in 1980s Louisiana and the reverberations on her family and community throughout the decades, set against the backdrop of one of Americaâs most mystical and overlooked landscapesâthe Acadian prairie.
On January 16, 1983, Aubrey LaHayeâs body was found floating in the Bayou Nezpique. His kidnapping ten days before sparked âthe biggest manhunt in the history of Evangeline Parish.â But his descendants would hear the story as lore, in whispers of the dreadful day the FBI landed a helicopter in the familyâs rice field and set out on horseback to search for the seventy-year-old banker.
Decades later, Aubreyâs great-granddaughter Jordan LaHaye Fontenot asked her father, the parish urologist, to tell the full story. He revealed that to this day, every few months, one of his patients will bring up his grandfatherâs murder, and the man accused of killing him, John Brady Balfa, who remains at Angola Prison serving a life sentence. Theyâll say, in so many words: âDr. Marcel, I really donât think that Balfa boy killed your granddaddy.â
For readers of Maggie Nelsonâs The Red Parts and Emma Copley Eisenberg's The Third Rainbow Girl, Home of the Happy unravels the layers of suffering borne of this brutal crimeâand investigates the mysteries that linger beneath generations of silence. Is it possible that an innocent man languishes in prison, still, wrongly convicted of murdering the authorâs great-grandfather?