Black-Eyed Susans
Tessa is an artist with a teenage daughter. Her husband is mostly absent, serving on an army base in Afghanistan.
When Tessa was sixteen—called “Tessie” at the time—she was abducted by a serial killer and left for dead in a hollow, together with the corpse of another girl and the bones of other victims. They are known collectively as the Black Eyed Susans, after the flowers that surrounded them in the field where they were found. Tessa has never been able to remember the face of the killer, or anything that happened during her abduction. She’s missing 32 hours of her life.
But a man was arrested for the crime and was tried and convicted. He’s now on death row and his execution date is nearing.
His case has been taken up by a team of lawyers who believe he is innocent and hope to prove it. And Tessa thinks they may be right, in part because someone is regularly planting Black-Eyed Susans in locations near her. They’re meant as a warning, she believes, and the man on death row couldn’t have planted them. She agrees to therapy, hoping that if she can uncover her hidden memories, it may help exonerate the convicted man before he is executed.
The novel alternates between two timelines: “Tessa” in the present (the book was published in 2015, but it’s not necessarily anchored to that year) and “Tessie” in 1995, shortly after she was rescued. The novel builds to a climax after several twisty turns and surprises.
Julia Heaberlin grew up in Texas and, like many would-be writers, became a journalist. She worked at newspapers in Detroit and Grand Rapids, Michigan, before returning to Texas where she won awards for her writing at both the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Dallas Morning News.
In her mid-forties, wanting to realize her dream of becoming a novelist, she sat down with her husband to work out if they could survive on his income if she quit work. (They could, and she did.) A year later she had written a mystery, Playing Dead. After a discouraging number of rejections, she finally landed an agent who started pitching it to publishers in 2008, but there were no takers. Heaberlin then spent eight months writing another book, Lie Still. After more rejections from publishers, and more rewriting, Random House finally bought both books. They were published in 2012 and 2013, respectively.
Black-Eyed Susans, published in 2015, is Heaberlin’s third novel. It quickly became an international bestseller. Paper Ghosts followed in 2018 and was named a finalist for Best Novel of the year by the International Thriller Writers. Her fifth book, We Are All The Same In The Dark, came out in 2020.
Heaberlin lives with her family in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, working on her next novel.
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