La Llorona: The Awakening (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781964642024)

In this powerful reimagining of the La Llorona legend, Mary Romasanta weaves together a chilling thriller and a poignant narrative of human connection, daring readers to confront the darkest depths of grief and find hope waiting on the other side.

Ma-Ri has lost everything: her husband, Greg, to a swift battle with cancer, and her two sons in a devastating tragedy on Thanksgiving. Wracked with guilt, she succumbs to the siren call of despair, haunted by the ghostly legend of La Llorona-the Weeping Woman said to lure the grieving to their doom. But her daughter-in-law, Ruth, isn't ready to let her go.

A brilliant technologist driven by love and loss, Ruth partners with Paul, a genius engineer who himself lost his brother to suicide, to develop innovative ways to safeguard Ma-Ri. Together, they tweak groundbreaking technology-originally designed to protect infants-to monitor Ma-Ri's vital signs and location, creating a system that intervenes before it's too late. But technology alone cannot battle the shadows of Ma-Ri's guilt, nor the eerie echoes of the La Llorona legend that seem to draw closer with every passing day.

As Ruth and Paul race against time to outsmart grief, Ma-Ri faces her own reckoning: the choice between succumbing to the relentless whispers of the river or finding redemption in the unlikeliest of places. Their lives intertwine in a struggle that melds the haunting folklore of the past with the cutting-edge possibilities of the future.