I’m a homicide detective who sends a prayer up every time I approach a body in my small, crime-ridden hometown of Byrd’s Landing, Louisiana. “Please don’t let it be anybody I know,” I ask the universe. My prayers are seldom granted. I usually keep it together by saving the mourning for later and investigating the crime until I had myself a killer. But I couldn’t do that at the scene of a triple homicide outside of an abandoned church. When I got to the last victim, I felt as if I had been sucker-punched. The man staring up at me with dead eyes was none other than Ezekiel Riverton.

I first met Zeke in the ninth grade. He was a soulful boy with luminous eyes and a smile that could coax a chicken bone from a pregnant stray dog. He had such a giving spirit. Once when visiting my serial killer father, Floyd “Fire” Burns, in prison, I told him about Zeke. Floyd said something that I’ll never forget; he said, “Looks like God done sent y’all a sponge.” He said that Zeke was built to soak up sin and grief from the troubled, and provide comfort in its place. He told me that all the grief he was sopping up was going to kill him. But grief didn’t get Zeke. Drugs did. They had him for a good long while before he was able to shake them. We still got together a couple of times a year, and sometimes he’d send a check-in text. I didn’t always answer right away, but every time I did it was like he was waiting for my call.

Lately, though, he’d made contacting me a career. He sent texts, left a ton of voicemails. Just the other morning I woke up to three texts from him. I told myself I’d call after the gym, but I stayed later than normal and was late for work. Lunch was another lost opportunity because I worked through it. Evening I spent at MMA practice, and had a late dinner at Chastain’s Creole Heaven because I was craving the lamb stew. Zeke sent two more text messages that night asking me to call him. I had every intention of doing just that, but in the morning.

Now in the churchyard, sweat trickled down my back as I watched the coroner’s wagon carry Zeke’s body away. I’ll never forget him lying there, his mouth open in accusation. Why didn’t I just answer his messages? What did he want to tell me? Did it have something to do with his death? And what hurt the most, could I have saved him? If Billy Ray, my ex-homicide partner, were here, he’d tell me to stop it. Not everything led back to me. “Write it down,” he would say. “Burn both ink and paper and don’t think about it no more.” I would heed his advice. After all, I had a killer to catch.

A KILLING BREATH
Series Name: A Raven Burns Mystery, Book 3
Genre: Southern Gothic Mystery
Release: March 2026
Format: Print, Digital
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop.org

Dark, Southern gothic tale of homicide detective Raven Burns, with a complicated past and a desperate case to solve. Black Girls Lit recommends the first book, A Killing Fire “to crime fiction and mystery lovers and fans of Ruth Ware and Gillian Flynn.”

Raven Burns owes her life to the kind souls who looked after her while her father, unbeknownst to them, sowed a path of blood and bodies from California to Louisiana as one of the most notorious serial killers ever known, Floyd “Fire” Burns. When Raven was a girl, Floyd brutally murdered one of those kind souls, Miss Ruth Jefferson, when the woman made the fatal decision to open the door to him on a pitch-black 4th of July night. As Raven learned of her father’s crimes, she vowed to do everything in her power to put men like him away. Decades later Raven’s hunt for a serial killer terrorizing the town leads her right back to that 4th of July night, and a memory that will make her question how much Floyd’s evil has settled in her bones.

About the author
Faye Snowden is the award-winning author of the southern gothic A Killing series mysteries. The second book in the series, A Killing Rain (Flame Tree 2022) was named by CrimeReads as one of the best southern gothic mysteries of 2022, and was long-listed for the CWA Gold Dagger. It won gold in the 2022 Books Foreword INDIES awards. The third book in the series, A Killing Breath releases March 31st, 2026. The fourth and final Raven Burns tale is in the works. Aside from novels, Faye writes short stories, two of which have appeared in ‘best of’ anthologies. Learn more about Faye at www.fayesnowden.com.