Excerpt of Hail Mary by Elizabeth Urso
PROLOGUE
1986
I was there when they found you.
Innards falling from your mouth. Muscle wedged between your teeth. An eyeball in your left hand, nerve endings grazing the cracked concrete floor.
I studied you in perfect silence, with the same devotion your forefathers studied the embalming arts. Your golden barrel curls, matted with tar. The stretched skin of your pregnant belly, almost translucent, sullied with crimson globs. A feather, fused to your left breast—noir against alabaster—fluffed up like your fluttering eyelashes.
Were you dreaming? I was no longer inhabiting your body, corrupting each of your mitochondria with an affinity for the macabre, so I couldn’t say for certain. But the slight upturn of your lips, your lax legs, and your swaying head were telltale signs. Where had your mind whisked you away to? A sandy beach far from these shores? I longed for the moment your dreamscape deteriorated, and you were yanked back to the jagged edges of the North Channel. When you realized where you were. What you’d done.
What I made you do.
Peter was the first to descend into the basement; the first confronted with the sordid scene. The redbrick wall and its blood brine. The putridity. The rot. His beloved grandfather, disemboweled by the instruments he’d once commanded. Aneurysm hooks. Dissecting forceps. Bone saws. You—the little sister he’d tormented instead of doting upon—covered in Foreman blood. A Foreman man’s blood. Mark and John followed, perpetually in their eldest brother’s shadow. At the base of the stairs, they stood frozen. Transfixed. Three tenors trying to find their vocal cords; wondering if their grandfather still had his, or if you’d eaten those smooth bands of muscle, too.
Excerpt from Hail Mary by Elizabeth Urso. Copyright © 2026 by Elizabeth Urso. Reprinted by permission of Rising Action Publishing (distributed by Simon & Schuster).
For fans of Simone St. James and Jennifer McMahon, Hail Mary is a thriller about a woman returning to her small hometown and a haunted family business, where generational secrets and cold cases refuse to stay buried.
Welcome to North Shore Township. Where you can never dig a grave too deep, and you can never keep a secret for too long.
The Foreman family has made their fortune burying the dead (and not just funeral services, allegedly). Mary Foreman fled North Shore Township years ago to escape her family’s legacy. But when her estranged mother reappears during a local election, reigniting rumors of corporate corruption and criminal activity, Mary’s uncle summons her to help with his campaign.
Mary leaves Toronto and takes up residence in Foreman House—the now-vacant gothic mansion once home to the Foremans and their infamous funeral business. She also secures a teaching job at her alma mater, St. Joseph’s School for Girls, set to unearth the time capsule her great-grandmother helped mastermind. But when the time capsule is opened, the family’s legacy rears its ugly head once again.
Embroiled in a criminal investigation—one with eerie parallels to several cold cases—Mary begins to unravel a truth rooted in her cursed matrilineal line, the haunted funeral home she grew up in, and the crime her mother stood trial for decades earlier. Crushed by the weight of the township’s suspicion, Mary must fight to prove her own innocence. Not only of recent crimes, but past ones, too. For this is the North Shore of Lake Huron, and the past is always present where the dead don’t die.
About Elizabeth Urso:
Elizabeth Urso is a graduate of Laurentian University, the University of New Brunswick Faculty of Law, and the Humber School for Writers. She’s a practising lawyer who lives wherever her partner—an Infantry Officer in the Canadian Armed Forces—is posted, along with their dog Harriet (the Spy).