The Sleeping Sisters

Fortuna Moves Across the Rio Grande to Escape a Curse

The Sleeping Sisters follows a mother who relocates her family to a better neighborhood, hoping distance can outrun a violent family inheritance. The promise of safety proves fragile when the past follows across the river.

Jeanette Has Chased Her Cousins’ Ghosts for Decades

A detective named Jeanette carries her own long investigation into the murders of her cousins. Her path collides with Fortuna’s after a body is discovered, bringing two women shaped by different forms of unresolved family violence into the same mystery.

A Headless-Woman Legend Gets Chicanified

Jennifer Givhan remixes the legend of the headless woman through Mexican American and Indigenous horror. The story is inspired by true events, but folklore gives those events another language—one capable of making inherited fear physically present.

Family History Becomes the Crime Scene

The novel’s hook is not just whether Fortuna and Jeanette can identify what happened. Each woman is already living inside the consequences, so solving the mystery also means confronting the bonds, ghosts, and curses that make leaving violence behind far harder than changing neighborhoods.