Jordan LaHaye Fontenot's Book Launch: Home of the Happy

Name: Jordan LaHaye Fontenot's Book Launch: *Home of the Happy*
Start: 2025-04-01T17:30:00-05:00
Location: 302 A Jefferson Street, Lafayette, LA, United States, Louisiana 70501

Schedule

Tue, 01 Apr, 2025 at 05:30 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

302 A Jefferson Street, Lafayette, LA, United States, Louisiana 70501 | Lafayette, LA

In her true crime debut *Home of the Happy: A Murder on the Cajun Prairie,* Lafayette author and Country Roads Magazine editor Jordan LaHaye Fontenot investigates the 1983 kidnapping and death of her great-grandfather, Aubrey LaHaye. In the book, Jordan unravels the mystery of Aubrey LaHaye’s murder, while also exploring the suffering it caused her family and trying to determine if the man accused of the crime was wrongfully convicted.
To celebrate the launch of *Home of the Happy,* Jordan LaHaye Fontenot will discuss her family’s tale alongside her father, Dr. Marcel LaHaye. They will cover Jordan’s writing process about the mysteries of her great-grandfather’s murder, as well as her father living through it.
The Q&A begins at 5:30 p.m. on April 1 at CHB Lafayette followed by a signing. We advise that you arrive for check in at 4:30 pm on April 1. Have your ticket(s) ready!
https://bontempstix.com/events/jordan-lahaye-fontenot-book-launch-home-of-the-happy-4-1-2025
Pre-order your signed copy and get tickets today for this engaging Q&A and signing with Jordan LaHaye Fontenot!
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Synopsis:
A riveting blend of true crime and memoir tracing the author’s investigation into the kidnapping and murder of her great-grandfather in 1980s Louisiana and the reverberations on her family and community throughout the decades, set against the backdrop of one of America’s most mystical and overlooked landscapes—the Cajun prairie.
On January 16, 1983, Aubrey LaHaye’s body was found floating in the Bayou Nezpique. His kidnapping ten days before sparked “the biggest manhunt in the history of Evangeline Parish.” But his descendants would hear the story as lore, in whispers of the dreadful day the FBI landed a helicopter in the family’s rice field and set out on horseback to search for the seventy-year-old banker.
Decades later, Aubrey’s great-granddaughter Jordan LaHaye Fontenot asked her father, the parish urologist, to tell the full story. He revealed that to this day, every few months, one of his patients will bring up his grandfather’s murder, and the man accused of killing him, John Brady Balfa, who remains at Angola Prison serving a life sentence. They’ll say, in so many words: “Dr. Marcel, I really don’t think that Balfa boy killed your granddaddy.”
For readers of Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts and Emma Copley Eisenberg's The Third Rainbow Girl, Home of the Happy unravels the layers of suffering borne of this brutal crime—and investigates the mysteries that linger beneath generations of silence. Is it possible that an innocent man languishes in prison, still, wrongly convicted of murdering the author’s great-grandfather?