Jennifer Givhan knows how to weave mesmerizing prose with a mysterious phycological thriller that keeps you up at night both wondering what's next and how she is able to put it all together. And now she's taking things up a notch by adding in a Persephone and Demeter retelling into the mix and turning it into something you never thought would be possible. But, of course, if anyone can do it, it's Jennifer. And trust us when we say that you won't be able to put it down as soon as you start reading.
Cosmopolitan has an exclusive first look at Jennifer Givhan’s Salt Bones, which is set to be released on July 22, 2025. After hearing that a local girl has gone missing, Mal quickly tries to get to the bottom of her disappearance while being forced to deal with her own story as the tales that she's heard of become more and more real. But is it real or all in leading to the one thing she's looking for: the truth? Here’s more info from our friends at Mulholland Books:
For fans of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic and Ramona Emerson’s Shutter: a gripping retelling of Persephone and Demeter in the Mexicali borderlands
At the edge of the Salton Sea, in the blistering borderlands, something is out hunting. . .
Malamar Veracruz has never left the dust-choked town of El Valle. Here, Mal has done her best to build a good life: She’s raised two children, worked hard, and tried to forget the painful, unexplained disappearance of her sister, Elena. When another local girl goes missing, Mal plunges into a fresh yet familiar nightmare. As a desperate Mal hunts for answers, her search becomes increasingly tangled with inscrutable visions of a horse-headed woman, a local legend who Mal feels compelled to follow. Mal’s perspective is joined by the voices of her two daughters, all three of whom must work to uncover the truth about the missing girls in their community before it’s too late.
Combining elements of Latina and Indigenous culture, family drama, mystery, horror, and magical realism in a spellbinding mix, Salt Bones lays bare the realities of environmental catastrophe, family secrets, and the unrelenting bond between mothers and daughters.
And just like Mal trying to get to the bottom of this big mystery by finding clues, you're going to want to try to take in as much of the book's cover as possible. You can exclusively check it out below:
Ready to figure out the truth? You can read an exclusive excerpt from Salt Bones below! Just make sure to pre-order the book and even take a look at some of Jennifer's previous releases while you're at it!
An Excerpt From Salt Bones
By Jennifer Givhan
3
not so dead
Sulfur. The rotten egg stink of a dying sea. It sticks to her lungs. The gurgling mud pots beside the toxic water. A vomitous splashing in the sopa bowl of her stomach.
No, not sulfur. Piss. A hot stream of it against the dirt.
The awful reek of ammonia, unmucked stables, all that urine-soaked alfalfa surfacing . . .
It comes to Mal first as the sticky sweetness of maple syrup, cloying. But there’s something of a trap already set in the sap. Dig into the silky warmth and it’ll harden into viscous pools — so the stories go. Those entranced by the horse-headed woman have to touch her hair. And when they realize it’s a mane and their schoolboy palms have clung to it like too much candy, they’re already caught. How quickly syrup turns to piss. It happens every time for Mal. A whiff of something enticing before it rots.
She jerks up from sleep, a mother troubled. It’s dark. She’s trembling.
She checks the body beside her, the steady rise and fall of the blanket, the snore deeper and more phlegm-trebled than she expected. It’s not Amaranta. She rubs her eyes and remembers where she is.
The rhythmic clop of hooves recedes to the steady drip, drip, dripping of a leaky faucet. Everything here leaks. This house, Gus’s once-seaside cottage, is falling apart.
What time is it?
Her phone on the nightstand says 4:00 a.m. No missed calls. No texts. No alarm. It’s Sunday. Four years since she last dreamed of the horse-headed woman who chased her the night Elena disappeared. Four years since she started therapy. Why has La Siguanaba reared her equine head now?
For a hundred years, townsfolk have claimed a horse-headed woman roams the beaches and surrounding desert as far as Mexico. La Siguanaba, they call her. Hideous one. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. She’s a shapeshifter. Some say she wears a high-collared lace dress, once white as wedding silk, now saturated in the rust-red innards of her victims. Some say she wears whatever a man lusts after most. Sequins. Spandex. Fishnet. Nothing at all. Legends tell of her lurking in the shadows, targeting womanizers and drunkards. Los borrachos.
No, she doesn’t sneak, no se esconde. She merely approaches with deliberate nonchalance. Leaning over, she lifts her long hair above her head, as if wringing out water, and then releases it, letting it cascade into a flowing waterfall. The men catch a glimpse of her naked form and dark, ethereal hair, and they’re undone.
“Reveal your face to me,” the borrachos y mujeriegos implore, enticed by her beauty. They misinterpret her reluctance as coyness, inching closer and closer until their breath grazes the back of her neck. Then she turns, allowing her long, dark hair to fall away — revealing the white-boned skull of a horse.
By the time they scream, it’s too late.
If she doesn’t kill immediately, she leaves men lost and wandering, mad in the wilderness. Mal has long worried it’s not only drunkards and womanizers La Siguanaba comes for, but children. Teenagers. Girls — everyone blames women when things go wrong.
She texts Amaranta:
You still up, baby? You alright?
The sick sensation that awoke her, the rumbling in her gut, burns her throat. She fumbles a hand to the nightstand again, feeling for the foil paper, grabbing two Tums and chewing while she waits to see if Amaranta’s side goes from “received” to “read.”
She’s been tumbling Amaranta out into the night since she was a girl. Griselda and Benny before her. They’re used to it. But that doesn’t make the next morning any less sloshy in her gut. Mother-guilt. It burns like the peppermint on her tongue.
Why does Mal let Mami get to her?
Her therapist says self-care first, then she can care for others. So Mal crashes at Gus’s place as often as she needs. Over the years, that’s meant once a month. Whenever Mal’s intestines twist and kink like the primal cuts in the industrial meat grinder, it’s time to step away from the house. Living with a narcissist has given her irritable bowel syndrome. That’s what her therapist says. For twenty-odd years, Mal’s IBS has been a surprisingly accurate barometer for how much Mami she can handle before she snaps. In some ways, she’s been a petulant teenager sneaking off to her boyfriend’s. But teenagers often excel at self-preservation. This has been the pattern since she was seventeen and dropped out of school to get her GED and take care of Benny. While it might not be the healthiest coping mechanism, it’s well-worn and rutted.
Mal used to believe Mami when she accused her of being the slut who should’ve disappeared instead of Elena; she’d hang onto Mami’s every hateful word. But a year after Griselda left for college, she called Mal and announced, “Mom, I think you should start therapy.” She gave Mal a list of numbers to call, so matter of fact. “See which one you feel comfortable with, okay? See which one sticks.” Mal shoved down the embarrassment she felt at having her barely adult daughter confront her, but she called each number on the list, made an appointment with the woman who bothered her the least, and promised she’d try it for three months, long enough to form a habit. That was four years ago. So why’s she dreaming about the horse-headed woman again now?
A paranoid thought gallops through her mind. Maybe La Siguanaba’s finally coming for her. She grabbed Elena instead of Mal when they were teenagers, in the fields, by the sea. Everyone in town said Elena deserved it. Bunch of misogynist assholes. But even after four years of therapy, a tiny part of Mal is still convinced the monstrous creature could’ve been after her instead of her sister. Mal was the daughter Mami wanted gone, after all.
If La Siguanaba came for Mal in the past but snatched her sister instead, and she’s back — who might she accidentally take if Mal’s not careful?
Or maybe it’s just guilt. Mal’s too old to be sneaking off, living a double life; pues, it’s eroding her relationship with her youngest. Mal can’t bear the thought of Amaranta pulling away. She’s not ready. Maybe this is just Mal’s psyche working overtime, convincing her to keep her ’jita close when her therapist’s challenging her to let go of the reins a bit and see what happens. What about your closeness with your daughter is good for your daughter, her therapist asks her, pointedly, versus what’s just good for you, Mal? So far, Mal hasn’t answered, just stared at the swirling patterns on the carpet. But the question has troubled her. Is she stifling her daughter with her own need? She pushes that thought way down — subterranean deep.
She checks her phone again. The little dots mean her daughter’s typing.
Mal releases a breath she didn’t realize she was holding. Amaranta texts back:
I’m fine. Was asleep til you texted. Weirdo.
She adds the clown face emoji.
Mal texts back a heart. Then adds a monkey covering their face with their palms. She can’t lie back down. The acid’s broiling her from the inside out.
The bed groans as she gets up and pads through Gus’s house, floorboards creaking. She folds her arms tightly across her chest and shivers as she passes the other bedroom, its door shut tight. It’s probably locked. She never goes in.
She slides on a pair of mules, unlocks the front door, and steps outside, aware she’s enacting the very motions Gus claims his daughter, Noemi, took twenty-five years before when she, too, vanished across the marsh.
The yard is littered with fish bones, scattered from the beach below, bleached white, crunching beneath her feet as she walks down to the sea. Along the way, she picks one up. It resembles a tooth.
Not the kind from Mal’s nightmares, torn from her swollen gums, their roots exposed and bleeding. Nor the kind Mami knocked out of her mouth in girlhood. No, this one reminds her of when she first met Gustavo Castillo, and he wanted the ones glinting at the water’s edge, jutting from the salted shore.
Mal, eighteen years old, had been down at the beach with baby Benny, studying for her GED and bird-watching.
She’d been staring at the water for hours, observing the pompous pelicans skimming the surface, diving like arrows toward the blue line, then rising with slick, squirming fish in their beaks. And the western sandpipers dancing across the muddy embankments on their stilts for legs, waggling their butts and tail feathers like ladies with fancy fans, calling for the smaller fish and insects they then piped into their beaks.
From the corner of her eye, she’d recognized the man with a crumpled map. He wasn’t much to look at — disheveled, dejected, rejected by his wife and the remaining fragments of the town. Yet something about how he held that map as he knelt by the salty shore intrigued Mal.
She hoisted Benny onto her hip and asked the man, “What’s on the map?”
“Places she isn’t.” His voice was both gruff and earnest, as if his throat were filled with gravel or he was on the verge of tears.
“Your daughter?” Her stomach clenched like a fish caught on a wire. Mal hadn’t known Noemi except in passing. She was in the same grade as Elena. Mal wasn’t too cool to hang out with younger classmates, but she didn’t hang out with anyone except Esteban before he became Stevie consumed with Sharon — prom king and queen. The perfect couple. And Mal was alone.
Folks called him The Devil. El Cucuy. The monstrous beast who sneaks into the homes of disobedient children and snatches them away. In some versions, he’s covered in prickly hair, akin to a chupacabra. In others, he has the slick skin of a regular man, but he’s evil just the same.
Legend says El Cucuy was once a mere father annoyed with his naughty children. He concocted a punishment to teach them a lesson, locking them in the closet where they could sweat it out while he ran some errands. But when he got back, he found his house had caught fire and his children had burned to death.
Did they curse him, or did he call the curse upon himself, in his disbelief and shock and guilt? Either way, El Cucuy now stalks the bedrooms of children, checking their armarios, under their beds.
But his search has grown chaotic over the years, his desire deranged.
No longer does he search for children to save but to fill the void within him, the burning ache where he cannot face what he’s done. Lingering by the water, Gus didn’t seem devilish, just profoundly sad.
She got on her knees and joined the search — baby Benny cooing a gurgly, drool-gummed laugh.
At first they spoke little, but gradually their exchanges became more philosophical. Gus shared the history of El Valle, revealing that he was a community college professor before his daughter disappeared. His words often took on a Socratic, teacherly tone, like he cared about what she thought. She returned each day with Benny as they scanned the beach and surrounding desert, fields, and thermal mud pots.
Three months in, Mal pulled something shining and iridescent from the ground. A sharp incisor. Pulpy and dark at the center. Knifelike at the tip.
Gus took her back to his house, saying “Let me show you something,” in a tone that made Mal worry she shouldn’t have brought baby Benny with her.
But you didn’t get as sad as Gus by hurting others. It comes from being hurt.
He retrieved a baby food jar filled with teeth of different sizes and colors, from milky beige to lurid yellow, from different mouths and various levels of oral hygiene. Some sharp enough to be animal razors, some dull as ground stone. Mal was both repulsed and intrigued.
That jar was macabre, but she held it, fascinated, examining the old, blood-crusted stumps. Tooth enamel is the toughest thing the human body makes. Tougher than bone. And yet, teeth are so easily dislodged. Uprooted. Like anything else, so easy to rot.
Then he pulled out that stained map and laid it on the counter beside the jar. It depicted their desert oasis adorned with Gus’s chicken scratch. Thick red markings resembled tributaries, their ink seeping into the map’s fabric. He’d left similar scribblings on the news clippings scattered throughout his house, dating back to the early days of El Valle and even further, delving into ancient myths and geological records.
“This where you found the teeth?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Are any your daughter’s?”
“The police would have to believe me to find out with forensics. They’d have to care.”
“Don’t you have dental records?”
“You know how it is out here.”
Mal nodded. She did know how it was out here.
The sheriff barely pretended to hide his speculations on Elena’s disappearance. Fast girls run. Period. The case never closed but it’d never really opened either.
“They all girl’s teeth?”
“Doubt it. Some are coyotes. Other animals.”
She held one up to her own tooth and gazed at her reflection in a dusty window. It fit. She didn’t have to imagine the force it would take to wriggle it out of the safebed of her gums and onto the playa floor. In that way, twisted though it might’ve been, she’d felt connected to Gus’s daughter, and to Gus himself. A small town will make monsters everywhere. That part Mal had always understood.
Now, she soaks in the duskish light dancing across the dying, drying lake. He won’t leave this ghost town or move farther inland like everyone else. He’s waiting for his daughter to return. No, he’s waiting to die and join her. And Mal’s been decaying alongside them in this purgatory. She isn’t being fair to their relationship, but nothing has been fair.
A shotgun cracks, leaving a familiar pop and crackle in Mal’s eardrums, snapping her out of her thoughts. She’s been out here an hour at least. She tromps back through the fields toward the thunderous sound coming from the east side of Gus’s property. The salted playa crackles beneath her feet the way she imagines ice would.
Mal finds Gus awake and in the yard, his shotgun aimed into the distance. His jeans fit snugly around his muscular thighs with a slight looseness at the waist that allows enough space for Mal to slip her hands between the waistband and his warm skin.
His most prominent feature are those thick, dark brows Mal secretly wishes she could pluck and paste onto her own meager arches. When she was a teenager, it was all the rage for girls to pluck theirs into wispy lines; luckily, her daughters take after their father, inheriting arches of which Frida Kahlo would be proud.
A few silver foxes burrow into the dark forest of his hair, curling at his scruff — while Mal, twenty years younger, has taken to dyeing her grays a rich bronzed brown.
Birds flock into the sky. A coyote rushes past. The sun peeks from behind the mountains.
“Catch the chupacabra?” she asks, pressing her body to his.
“Damned raccoons eating my vegetables.”
“You old codger,” she laughs. “Viejo gruñón.”
Gus harumphs, puts the safety on the gun, points it to the ground, and opens his arms for Mal, who leans into her beloved.
His grief should’ve wilted him into a man much older than his sixty-one years, but his good genes have preserved him. Only a few russet sunspots scatter across his cheeks. Mal covers hers with makeup, but anyone who saw them together would assume they were the same age. Of course, no one ever saw them together. That was the point.
He smells of vanilla, bourbon, and earth, in that order. He’s barefoot. Shirtless. Irredeemably handsome. She’d have had to watch out for women throwing themselves at him if they lived elsewhere. Here, Mal has him all to herself.
“I wish the girls had let me teach them to hunt,” she says, wrapping her muscular arms around him. Although she’s petite, Mal’s full-on brawny from heaving beef carcasses above her head. Papi stopped hunting after Elena disappeared, but Mal eventually took Benny when he was old enough, passing on the age-old traditions their father wanted but refused to share with the son he didn’t claim.
It’s weird that Mal never took her own daughters out. She can’t say why not. Griselda was staunchly vocal against it from the start. Or she was just as squeamish as Esteban. And, of course, she influenced her sweet and philosophical little sister who cried over a coyote one hot summer when desert creatures wandered into town searching for food and water. Amaranta wanted to treat it like any stray dog they could rescue.
“You tried, that’s the main thing,” Gus says.
She didn’t try hard enough. As with so many things with her girls. Their girls.
They don’t know their father at all. Over the years, there’s been a murky truce. Gus stayed attentive during Mal’s pregnancy without directly acknowledging the babies. He wasn’t ready to be a father again.
When the girls were little, he was a shadow at the edges of parties or the park, watching his daughters play from afar. When Griselda was four, maybe five, she’d asked Mal if guardian angels could look like regular people. She’d described Gus. He’d cried when Mal told him, fat tears rolling down the puppyish slants of his eyes, down his scruffy, square jaw, and onto his flannel button-down.
Still, Mal hadn’t wanted to bring her daughters into this — this vast, aching sadness and all the town’s hatred toward him — so year after year, they’d reluctantly agreed to keep their secret.
“You were out there early,” Gus muses into the gap of her silence, kissing atop her head.
She wants to admit she was torn out of a recurring nightmare she thought she’d buried when she started therapy. The truth? La Siguanaba scared the shit out of her. What if Mal disappeared and her girls never knew who their father was? She’d never meant to keep the secret this long. But if she’s not careful, he’ll recoil. She has to package it gently. He won’t like this one bit. Not after all these years. Instead, she says, “I think you should meet the girls.”
Deep ridges form in the desert sand of his face. Mal has put them there. He runs a palm along the smooth, wood finish of his rifle comb but says nothing.
“You could come for dinner? The night after Esteban’s fundraiser?”
“Why now, Mal?” He stoops down, resting his rifle across his knee, and pulls a wilted carrot from the dirt. A pale, sickly orange thing covered in soil, ringed and sprouted, the tip tentacled with roots. “Griselda’s grown. Amaranta’s in high school. That ship has sailed. I screwed it all up. They don’t want to meet some old man.” He brushes off the dirt. “Everything’s dying.”
Her therapist says if she wants her daughters to trust her, she must trust them. But that kind of trust takes guts. The mother’s catch-22. Has she raised her children to accept her when she shows herself to be human? Well enough to love her, warts and all?
Mal reaches for the vegetable. Snaps it in two. It crunches. The innards are bright. “Not so dead,” she says, kneeling on the ground with him. “It’s time.”
Maybe Mami and Papi could’ve protected Elena if they’d been on the same page, working together instead of fighting. They were distracted by the shitstorm between them. The mess they’d created. It’s time for Mal and Gus to clean up their mess.
Mal’s held onto her family’s pain like a birthright. She’s held it tight so she wouldn’t pass it on to her daughters. But it’s time to let it go.
Tears well at the corners of his eyes like broken irrigation sprinklers then fall down the black stubble at his square jawline and neck, the slight protrusion of his Adam’s apple. Finally, Gus sighs and gently pulls her in, kisses the top of her head again. “After the fundraiser.”
A lukewarm response — but she’ll take it.
Excerpted from the book SALT BONES by Jennifer Givhan. Copyright © 2025 by Jennifer Givhan. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved.
Salt Bones, by Jennifer Givhan, will be released on July 22, 2025. To preorder the book, click on the retailer of your choice:
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