Veronica Del Rey has spent fifteen years tending her mother's dying roses and listening to whispers that may or may not be grief playing tricks on her. The preacher's daughter. The fourth-grade teacher. The woman who never leaves Tulsa. She's twenty-seven and already buried alive.
Then a friend gives her an address. A house on the edge of town, past the railroad tracks. A man named Francis Hernandez—medium, fortune teller, or something far more dangerous, depending on who's telling the story.
Francis looks at Veronica and sees everything. The insomnia. The shame. The hunger she's never confessed to anyone. He's spent his life draining desperate women and moving on. She was supposed to be no different.
But she is.
As her mother's voice grows clearer and the town's whispers turn to accusations, Veronica makes a choice that costs her everything—her job, her family, her place in the world. She gives herself to a man who planned to ruin her. And he, against every instinct, falls.
Dark Paradise is a dark literary novel about grief that doesn't know when to stop, love that arrives wearing a monster's face, and the terrifying freedom of choosing yourself when the whole world says you shouldn't.
