NATIONAL BESTSELLER "Riveting and atmospheric,  Home of the Happy  is also a heartfelt grappling with a trauma in the author’s family and her attempts to unravel its secrets once and for all. LaHaye Fontenot’s writing is urgent, fueled not just by a desire for justice but by love for her ancestors and the Cajun community of south Louisiana. A must-read for true crime and mystery fans."— Ana Reyes,  New York Times  bestselling author of  The House in the Pines On January 16, 1983, Aubrey LaHaye’s body was found floating in the Bayou Nezpique, the grim end to a shocking South Louisiana kidnapping. His abduction ten days before sparked “the biggest manhunt in the history of Evangeline Parish.” But his descendants would hear the story as lore, in whispers of the dreadful day the FBI landed a helicopter in the family’s front lawn and set out on horseback to search for the seventy-year-old banker. Decades later, Aubrey’s great-granddaughter Jordan LaHaye Fontenot asked her father, the parish urologist, to tell the full story. He revealed that local whispers of a possible wrongful conviction persist to this day. Every few months, one of his patients will bring up his grandfather’s murder, and the man accused of killing him, John Brady Balfa, who remains at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola serving a life sentence. They’ll say, in so many words: “Dr. Marcel, I really don’t think that Balfa boy killed your granddaddy.” For readers of Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts and Emma Copley Eisenberg's The Third Rainbow Girl ,  Home of the Happy  is a powerful investigative memoir that unravels the layers of suffering borne of this brutal crime—and investigates the family secrets and mysteries that linger beneath generations of silence. Is it possible that an innocent man languishes in prison, still, wrongly convicted of murdering the author’s great-grandfather? A Haunting Cold Case: Revisit the 1983 kidnapping and murder of banker Aubrey LaHaye, a crime that sparked the biggest manhunt in Evangeline Parish history and left a legacy of doubt. - Deeply Personal True Crime: Follow the author as she breaks generations of family silence to uncover the truth of her great-grandfather’s death, piecing together a story she only heard in whispers. - Cajun Culture and Setting: Immerse yourself in the atmospheric world of south Louisiana, where tight-knit communities hold long memories and the lines between lore and fact have blurred over time. - Unsolved Mysteries: Confront the central question that still echoes through the bayou: Did the right man go to prison, or has an innocent man been paying for someone else’s crime for forty years? “In an impressive feat of both memoir and original reporting, Jordan LaHaye Fontenot has cast a reporter’s gaze on her own family’s buried secrets. But the real value to  Home of the Happy  lies beyond the brutal crime at its center, in showing us Acadiana and its people as we’ve never seen them before—mired in complexity, rife with beauty, and haunted by injustice.” - Walter Isaacson "Riveting and atmospheric,  Home of the Happy  is also a heartfelt grappling with a trauma in the author’s family and her attempts to unravel its secrets once and for all. LaHaye Fontenot’s writing is urgent, fueled not just by a desire for justice but by love for her ancestors and the Cajun community of south Louisiana. A must-read for true crime and mystery fans." - Ana Reyes, New York Times bestselling author of The House in the Pines "Relentlessly reported, intricately crafted, and told with the heartbreaking lyricism of a true Cajun poet,  Home of the Happy  is a towering achievement of nonfiction storytelling. It’s a mystery full of swampy intrigue, an unflinching meditation on the nature of justice, a labyrinth of small town conspiracies, and a cultural history of remarkable scope and insight. Jordan LaHaye Fontenot is a revelatory new voice for Acadiana, and America." - Joshua Wheeler, author of Acid West “Simultaneously lurid and lyrical, gothic and graceful, surreal and serene. . . [ Home of the Happy is] memoir, reportage, and investigative journalism, wrapped in a propulsive narrative that tells the tale of a family and a place across time.” - Country Roads "No one wants to belong to the murdered great-grandfathers club, but I feel better knowing that Jordan LaHaye Fontenot is here with me, tackling generational trauma and secrecy with tenderness, ethics, and the precision of a surgeon. Home of the Happy is true crime at its best. I simply cannot fathom how LaHaye Fontenot not only conducted her own investigation of her great-grandfather’s murder, but braided it with stirring personal and historical anecdotes into a taut and thrilling masterpiece. I absolutely inhaled it."  - Ruth Madievsky, bestselling author of All-Night Pharmacy " Home of the Happy is a brilliant debut, gripping and generous in equal measure. Jordan LaHaye Fontenot looks at her family’s tragic history with empathy but