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, 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?