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Behind the Book with Kelsey Cox

Bestselling author Kelsey Cox shares her new book "Pretty Dead Things." Registration is required for this free author event.

As a Texas native, author Kelsey Cox was fascinated by the culture surrounding beauty pageants, and how the dark lurking behind the scenes was the perfect place to set a thriller. "I'm often drawn to spaces where women are expected to perform perfection," Kelsey says. "Beauty pageants, with all their glitter, competition, and tradition, are a natural pressure cooker—where the gap between who a woman is and who she's supposed to be can't help but crack open."

Pretty Dead Things is an atmospheric novel about beauty queens and what lies behind the glitz and glamour of Texas beauty pageants.

2000: Isabelle Whitmore vanishes at Sherman Ranch in Anhalt, Texas, without a trace.

2025: The Lone Star Princess Pageant is about to begin, but this year it's offering more than an annual dose of rhinestone heels and plunging necklines. Competition is stiffer than ever, and long-standing grudges are about to resurface. Ingrid fled Anhalt in the wake of her sister Isabelle's disappearance and has now returned, just in time for a construction crew to start digging up Sherman Ranch; the pageant brings up past traumas that Melanie can't forget; Cat, newly sober, starts to feel threatened in ways that bring back old demons; and Sarah Lynn, who comes from a long line of pageant winners, knows that losing is not an option.

When old resentments and new confrontations reach their boiling point, temperatures drop to deadly degrees as a record-setting storm brings down the state's power grid. With everyone trapped under one roof, scores will be settled, and more than one person will end up dead. Beauty dies. Secrets never do.

Book sales and signing will follow the conversation. Registration is required for this free author event. Presented by the Carmel Clay Public Library Foundation.

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