Cam opened the new lock he’d installed on the apartment door, blah-blahing about how he didn’t have to do this, how me and Joey had made the bed we could now no longer sleep in, etc. My knees knocked in the cold hallway. When he finally let me in, I cruised through the kitchen, dishes in the sink and overflowing garbage someone else’s problem now.

In our bedroom, the white-cold Chicago winter light poured through the window. The thrift-store curtains had been yanked down and left in two blue puddles on the floor.

Had Joey done that? Left all our ratty possessions overexposed in sharp, forensic detail?

“You waiting on a starting pistol to go off or what?” Cam said. He stood planted in the mossy carpet as though I might try to knock him over for the turntable. My turntable.

On the surface of our broken-down dresser sat a small wooden box with a missing clasp. I was reaching out my left hand, the tattooed vines down to my first knuckles stretching, claiming, when Cam barked, “Not that. And nothing inside it, either.”

Did Cam think I owned jewelry? I only kept hairbands and guitar picks in there.

“What am I allowed to take, then?”

“A few necessities, I told you,” Cam said. “I’m getting my money out of you and that boyfriend of yours, even if it’s through the pawn shop.”

Freaking Joey.

Out on the street, I could hear Chicago going about its cold, cranky day, an incessant honk at someone parked in the wrong spot, a siren woop-wooping past on the busy street.

I trailed my garbage bag behind me over to the closet. “Well, you won’t get any money for old threads.”

Before Cam could have an opinion, I reached inside for an armful of hangers, pushing the showy, spangled western-wear stuff I wore on stage deep into the middle. I rolled it all up in a ball against my gut, casual, nothing to see here, and tumbled the lot into the bag.

“You don’t seem to understand you should be left with just the clothes on your back, Dahlia,” Cam said. “This is me being generous.”

I crouched low with my head in the closet, back pockets in the air to distract him while I searched everything Joey had left behind for the rent money. Of course I’d already checked all his favorite hidey-holes. The pockets of this jacket, these jeans, the crate of records—

“Not those,” Cam barked.

My vinyl.

I backed out of the closet. “Come on, man. I’ve been collecting those for years, long before we moved into this dump.”

“You can swipe them from the shop next week, right? Use your employee five-finger discount.”

I turned back to the closet. I’d been too impatient, going for something I really wanted like that. But now I was certainly owed a win.

I reached quickly for my Frye boots.

Scuffed black leather, silver harness loops at the ankle. Country by way of James Dean on a motorcycle, and sturdy. They were valuable on their own, but worth far more to me.

None of your business! I’ll tell you later.

“Unless you got fired from the shop on top of everything else.”

I held my breath until the boots were in the bag.

Cam burst into laughter. “You did! Not the best week for the Dahlia Dee-Vine?”

My eyes scraped the room, grazing—barely—the screen of the TV, but Cam was ready and moved in front of it. What did it matter? I couldn’t cart the thing on the 56 bus.

I reached into the top dresser drawer and waved a pair of hot pink panties. “I need to grab a few of these.”

While his head was turned, I nabbed a few hairbands and a handful of guitar picks, too, and three pairs of Joey’s thick wool hiking socks to get me through winter.

I moved quickly now, drawer to drawer, wrenching broken handles and running my hands inside along the side and back panels. But I had already done all this. The rent money was gone, and Joey was nothing but a cartoon puff of dust.

But I wasn’t crying about Joey. And I didn’t care about an old TV, or even—

“Are you singing right now?” Cam said.

Didn’t realize I was. It happened, okay?

Or even my vinyl collection! My sweet, sweet vinyl. No, what I cared about more than anything Joey cost me was being made a fool of.

I’d let my guard down. It wouldn’t happen again.

WRECK YOUR HEART
Genre: Traditional Mystery
Release: January 2026
Format: Print, Digital, Audio
Purchase Link

From award-winning author Lori Rader-Day, Wreck Your Heart is an engaging, “wisecracking and wonderful” crime novel with a big heart, about a country and midwestern singer out to catch her big break before family—or murder—wrecks everything.

Dahlia “Doll” Devine had the kind of hardscrabble beginning that could launch a thousand broken-hearted country songs, but now she’s the star of her own stage at McPhee’s Tavern. As part of Chicago’s—yes, Chicago’s—country music scene, Dahlia is an up-and-coming singer in spangles and boots of classic country tunes. Up and coming, that is, until her boyfriend Joey up and went, taking the rent money with him.

So Dahlia is back to square one, relying on Alex McPhee—again. Alex helped her out of a bad situation when she was a kid living rough with her mother. Now he’s part landlord, part band booster, all-around rescuer. It’s just that Dahlia wishes she didn’t keep giving him reasons to have to do it.

Just as Dahlia suspects she’s scraped rock bottom, the mother she hasn’t spoken to in twenty years shows up with something to say. The next morning, a distraught young woman arrives at the bar, asking after her missing mother—Dahlia’s mother, too, even if the missing suburban PTA mom the girl describes sounds pretty different from the one who let Dahlia down all those years ago.

Though no one is using the word sister any time soon, Dahlia lets herself be drawn into reuniting the family that might have been hers. But when a body is discovered outside McPhee’s Tavern, the crime threatens not just the place Dahlia has made into a home, but everything she’s believed about her past, her dreams for the future, and the people she was just, maybe, beginning to let into her heart.

About the author
Lori Rader-Day is the Edgar Award-nominated and Agatha, Anthony, and Mary Higgins Clark award-winning author of Wreck Your Heart, The Death of Us, Death at Greenway, The Lucky One, Under a Dark Sky, and others. She lives in Chicago, where she co-chairs the crime fiction readers’ event Midwest Mystery Conference and teaches creative writing at Northwestern University. Visit her at www.LoriRaderDay.com.