Home of the Happy: A Murder on the Cajun Prairie

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. His kidnapping 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 to this day, every few months, one of his patients will bring up the cold case of 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 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?

Investigative Memoir: The author dives into her own family’s dark past to uncover the truth of her great-grandfather's murder. South Louisiana Setting: A haunting look at the Cajun community, where local whispers and long-held doubts challenge the official story of the crime. Potential Wrongful Conviction: Decades after John Brady Balfa was sentenced to life in Angola, the question remains: did the real killer get away? Generational Trauma: Explores the silence and suffering passed down through a family haunted by a brutal crime and the biggest manhunt in parish history.