Broken Bayou (2024) is writer and filmmaker Jennifer Moorhead’s debut novel. A thriller that pays homage to the author’s home state of Louisiana, Broken Bayou tells the story of troubled psychologist Willa Watters’s fraught return to the small town where she spent childhood summers in her great aunts’ historic home. Moorhead is a self-professed lover of “twisty” suspense novels, and Broken Bayou is full of foreshadowing, surprise plot twists, and tension. It showcases the sociological complexities, shifting allegiances, and long-buried secrets in a rustic community not unlike the one in which the author makes her home, and it draws attention to the socio-economic decline that characterizes many bayou communities in rural Louisiana. The author uses the protagonist’s career in child psychology, serial murders, and strained family dynamics to explore themes related to fraught family relationships, strength and resilience, and the psychological impact of secrets.

This guide refers to the 2024 paperback edition by Thomas and Mercer.

Content Warning: This guide and the source text contain discussions of mental illness, addiction, self-harm, suicide, domestic abuse, and gender-based violence.

Plot Summary

The novel begins as narrator and protagonist Willa Watters, a celebrity child psychologist, returns to the small town of Broken Bayou, Louisiana, to collect a few boxes of her mother’s possessions from her recently deceased great aunts’ house. Her trip into the countryside is also a way to escape the media storm that has surrounded her since she had an on-air breakdown during a recent television interview. Clips from the interview were widely publicized and criticized, and she now faces a barrage of questions not only about her mental fitness, but about her morals, personal life, and work history. Broken Bayou is familiar territory to Willa, although she has not returned there in many years. Her great aunts had a home there, and she spent childhood summers at their house with her mother and younger sister Mabry. The aunts both passed away recently, and Willa hopes to retrieve a damning security tape from among the boxes her mother left in their attic.

Willa arrives in Broken Bayou just as a series of grisly murders has been uncovered: The bodies of several women have been discovered in barrels in the receding waters of the bayou, and the police are looking for a serial killer. The town is swarming with reporters, and Willa realizes that she has not chosen the best place to hide out. Her own public shame is common knowledge, and Willa is forced to interact with a series of locals who remember her as a “fancy” outsider and are only too happy to revel in her misfortune. However, not everyone in the town is hostile to Willa. Her aunts’ lawyer, who has a son with autism, is happy to have access to Willa’s empathy and expertise. Her former boyfriend, Travis Arceneaux, seems ready to reconnect, and a cherished mother figure from her childhood is there to lend a helping hand when she needs it.

Gradually, it becomes clear that Willa’s polished exterior and successful career mask a troubled past (and present). Willa struggles with her own mental health and relies on harmful coping mechanisms to manage her past trauma and volatile emotions. Additionally, the security tape Willa is looking for contains evidence of a crime she helped her mother cover up decades ago. Willa dumped her mother’s red convertible into the bayou, supposedly so that her mother could collect insurance money. Willa does not want the tape to fall into the wrong hands, but when the convertible is dredged up with a body in its trunk, Willa realizes that having illegally dumped the car is the least of her worries. Bodies keep turning up in barrels, and it seems likely that Willa’s mother’s car is somehow connected to the murders. Travis, who is now a local law enforcement officer, is working on the murder case, but he is also connected to Willa’s mother’s car: It was Travis who’d helped Willa dump the vehicle, and he is now implicated, like Willa, in whatever crimes it is connected to.

Willa, Travis, and a reporter named Rita are all investigating the case on their own behind the backs of other local law enforcement, and initially both Willa and Rita suspect Travis’s troubled brother Doyle of being the murderer. The Arceneaux family and Willa share complicated family histories rife with abuse, addiction, and serious mental health struggles, and Doyle appears to be threatening Willa. Willa reaches out to her mother, who lives in a care facility, for information, but her mother is initially not forthcoming. She has struggled for years with bipolar disorder, addiction, and the law, and she often involved Willa in her schemes and never took responsibility for her actions. Willa knows that her sister Mabry, who recently died by suicide, is at the center of the mystery of the car, but she initially does not understand the exact nature of Mabry’s involvement.

When Willa finds the security tape, she realizes that Mabry accidentally ran over their mother’s shady boss with the car. Her mother then hoisted his body into the trunk, planning to dispose of the body by pushing the car into the bayou. Unbeknownst to her, the man was not dead and managed to escape. When Willa realizes that her mother lied to her—asking her to dispose of the car without telling her about the body she thought was inside it—she is initially shocked and angry at this betrayal. However, the body dredged up in her mother’s car does not turn out to be that of her mother’s boss. Instead, it is that of Emily Arceneaux, Travis’s sister. Travis, not Doyle, is revealed as the town’s serial killer: He put his sister’s body in the car after Willa dumped it into the water. Willa and Rita uncover the truth, but not before being targeted by Travis themselves. They both end up drugged and placed in barrels in the bayou, but they both manage to escape. As the novel ends, Willa is working with a trauma specialist to process her ordeal in Broken Bayou, and she has invited her mother to move into her home. The two work together to forgive, forget, and move on, and Willa seems poised to finally address her complex past and buried grief.