BLESS YOUR HEART by Leigh Dunlap - Spotlight

 

BLESS YOUR HEART (Crooked Lane Books)  is a fitting title for Leigh Dunlap’s twisty and complex thriller about a Southern upscale community where no one is really who they seem, and everyone is lying to each other. 

 

Anderson Tupper, a member of one of Atlanta’s richest families, has been found murdered in the dugout of the Little League field where he was a volunteer coach, and it’s up to Detective Shay Claypool, a single mother from the other side of town, to find his killer. Accustomed to handling drug dealers and prostitutes, she must now contend with an even more sinister group: the Buckhead Betties, the insufferably entitled women of Georgia’s most affluent zip code.

 

Dunlap shares a particular moment that propelled her to write the novel: “One day, while watching my son play Little League baseball in Buckhead, a mother from the opposing team called one of our ten-year-old players an ‘a$$hole.’ The shock from that abhorrent behavior by a fellow parent stayed with me. I knew there had to be a big, juicy, immersive story to tell that was set there and that would shine a bright light on its rich, complicated citizens who can be both wonderful and awful. Something as terrible as murder didn’t seem too far out of the realm of possibility in Buckhead—even at the kids’ baseball field.”

Leigh Dunlap began her writing career in first grade when she spectacularly failed her first math test. It was then that she realized her kindergarten dream of being a Wall Street finance guru was probably out of reach. 

She pivoted to writing and after somehow making it through Calculus in high school, she went to film school at the University of Southern California to study screenwriting. That expensive education led her to a job selling socks at Fred Segal and eventually to an assistant’s desk at a Hollywood talent agency. 

That’s where she really learned how to write—while reading hundreds of scripts sent in for actors. A few years in the muddy trenches of Hollywood finally led to her writing her first screenplay, a modern-day version of Cinderella. Like every overnight success story, it was another five years before A Cinderella Story, with Hilary Duff, was made by Warner Brothers. 

Since then, Leigh has written two other movies (The Standoff and 16-Love) that were produced and a whole lot of other ones that weren’t. The twin catastrophes of the pandemic and the writer’s strike led Leigh to write her debut novel BLESS YOUR HEART. It’s about a murder in the South and a bunch of Buckhead Betties (Atlanta’s version of Karens) who may or may not have killed someone. 

Leigh once lived in Atlanta but won’t admit to having been a Buckhead Betty. When she’s not writing (which is never—including right this moment while she’s writing this bio), Leigh searches for buried treasure, because after Wall Street finance guru, screenwriter and novelist, pirate is next on the list.