Poison Wood by Jennifer Moorhead (EXCERPT)

Hello, dear reader! We have a terrific spooky season excerpt for you today, with an atmospheric new thriller set in one of my own nightmare locations: boarding school.

Jennifer Moorhead’s Poison Wood follows an ambitious journalist as she discovers that the secrets she thought long buried are cropping up in unexpectedly chilling ways. Crime reporter Rita Meade has just scored a coup with her docuseries on the Broken Bayou serial killer. But instead of celebrating or enjoying a well-deserved rest in her Dallas home, she’s off chasing another story, one with deep roots to a chapter of her past that she doesn’t necessarily want to revisit.

As a teenager, she’d been shipped off to Poison Wood Therapeutic Academy For Girls, a boarding school deep in the Louisiana woods. Filled with society teens who didn’t conform to their parents’ standards, the academy provided her with an unexpected education in the darker side of life. A series of disturbing incidents would eventually close the school down, including the disappearance of Heather, one of Rita’s fellow students. A man was sent to jail for Heather’s murder, sentenced by Rita’s dad, a strict and powerful judge. But now Heather’s skull has been found on school grounds, and Rita’s received a disturbing text message that has her flying to Miami for answers. Will her relentless pursuit of the truth prove worthwhile, or will she come to regret what she eventually discovers?

Our excerpt today gives us insight into the person Rita is, as she patiently waits for contact from her source, while gingerly asking questions of the person who casts an outsized shadow over her life:

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Chapter One

Miami, Florida
February 11, 2019
7:45 p.m. EST

I’m nursing a scotch at the sleek, backlit mother-of-pearl bar at the Setai hotel in Miami Beach when I first hear whispers of a body being found.

I’m always listening for whispers like that. My ears are trained to home in on words like body and crime. You never know where a scoop is hiding. It’s why while most people sleep with a sound machine by their bed, I sleep with a police scanner.

I motion for the bartender, who doesn’t look old enough to be in a bar, much less serving me Macallan in one. She tops off my glass as I glance down the bar at two cocktail waitresses with their heads together whispering.

“What’s going on?”

“Another body found,” she says. “This city and its gangs.”

It’s every city, though, every town. And it’s not just gangs. No place escapes death. That’s why I have a job.

I want more details, but I need to stay on task here. One body at a time. And the one I’m focused on is the one whose skull was dug out from a wall at an abandoned boarding school, hidden deep in the thick pines of the Kisatchie National Forest. A place surrounded by swamps and poisonous snakes, deterrents for girls who thought they could run away. I should know. I was one of those girls.

But now it looks like one girl we thought had run away has been found.

At least according to the article sent to me yesterday by a woman I don’t know named Laura Sanders. A source who wants to talk in person and who got my attention with the words I built my career on: Rita Meade, I know you are someone I can trust.

Trust.

That’s a tricky, slippery slope at the moment. I pick up my glass of Macallan and take a sip.

The article was from a local paper in a small quaint town with cobblestone streets and a river that moves as slowly as the people who live there. A town where a plaque hangs in the visitors’ bureau, welcoming you to the oldest settlement in Louisiana while also explaining how to pronounce its name: Nack-a-tish.

The two whispering waitresses move on to a long table in the far corner, where a group of young, beautiful, and expensively dressed men and women laugh and toast.

The Setai Miami Beach is not the usual hotel I stay in when meeting up with a source. But it’s the hotel I booked on my dime. A decision served up by my guilt over not telling my boss at National Crime Network, Dom Drake, the whole story. Or rather, my connection to the story.

I’d seen the Asian-inspired art deco hotel tagged on Laura Sanders’s husband’s social media. Laura Sanders has no social media. When I’d googled Laura, all I discovered was she was a mom of a little girl and the wife of a man who makes enough money to afford a Global plane, a gated home on Star Island, and a vacation ranch in Aspen. But unlike other women in her position, Laura did not post pictures of her fabulous life. I’d found one obscure picture of her with her husband at a fundraiser for Futures Without Violence, but that was it. Seems Marshall Sanders is much more face forward. I’m used to that with politicians. Their wives usually shut down their socials once the hubby is elected to office. I wonder if maybe Marshall has political aspirations.

After another sip of my scotch, I open my phone again to my last text thread with Laura Sanders and add another to it.

I’m already in town. I can meet any time tomorrow.

Yesterday was a one-two punch kind of day. My well-timed and painfully orchestrated premiere for the docuseries I helped produce in record time, Broken Bayou: Serial Killer in a Small Town, following on the heels of my interview with my friend and fellow survivor, Dr. Willa Waters. Dom said it was a coup. I’m allowed to call him Dom now. Mr. Drake is reserved for the reporters who aren’t on the verge of winning him an Emmy. Little does he know we all call him Doom behind his back. That’s what we sell at NCN, after all.

That’s not all Dom doesn’t know, though. He doesn’t know that the lead I told him about is one that is personal to me.

I squeeze my hand into a fist.

I’ve never kept information from Dom before. Not sharing my connection to a potential story is a problem. A big problem. But so is digging around in the past.

I built my career on trust, and if this lead turns out to be legitimate, that trust is going to be questioned. But I can handle it. He asked what the story was, and I told him it had to do with an old case near my hometown in Louisiana. Not a complete lie.

Of all the stories I’ve chased, this is the one I packed away over a decade ago. A story I protected because Poison Wood Therapeutic Academy for Girls is one story I never wanted to tell. Now a woman named Laura Sanders may not give me a choice.

I told myself on the flight from Dallas earlier today that I was going to fill Dom in as soon as I knew more about this source. A source whose last communication with me was Be careful, Rita.

I’ve heard that phrase many times from many different people over the years: my dad; my boss; Carl Frost, my camera guy for the last eight years. But hearing them from a stranger in relation to a school that had to close its doors because so many bad things had happened there has my full attention.

I finish off my drink and press into my temples to try to stop the pounding that started two days ago.

Despite that, the timing on this lead could be good. The thought of going to my house in Dallas and sitting around in the quiet instead of chasing a story was not appealing. A quiet space would mean reflecting. Reflecting is for people who teach yoga, not for those who run toward trauma.

“Another one?” the bartender says, walking up and pointing to my empty glass.

I nod to her.

I could have ordered this hotel’s notorious Gold Martini, garnished with 24-karat gold flakes, but since it’s $125 a drink, I opted for a scotch instead. Besides, I hate vodka.

I try but fail to stop the flood of high school memories unleashed on me since reading the article about the skull found at Poison Wood Therapeutic Academy for Girls. Vodka had been our drink of choice at Poison Wood because that was our math teacher’s drink of choice. We stole her stash every chance we got. A crime she couldn’t report because having booze on the grounds was a fireable offense.

Stealing was the first thing I learned how to do when I got to Poison Wood. Most girls there had already mastered the trait. But I’d come in grossly unprepared. The punishment of Poison Wood never fit my crime as a disobedient teen. I’d been caught with a boy in my room. We’d both been bumbling idiots who didn’t even get the chance to do anything worth punishing. My father, Judge Mac Meade, barged in and saw us partially clothed and started researching all-girls schools the next day. He was known for his tough sentences. I was no exception. And he was no exception to the powerful parents at the school he found. Judges, DAs, state senators, and at least one governor all had daughters who attended that school. A real Louisiana who’s who.

The bartender sets a fresh drink in front of me, and I swirl around the one large round ice cube before taking a sip.

I lean back against my soft leather bar chair and check the time.

It’s 6:45 in Louisiana. My father and his wife, Debby, will probably be eating dinner, but I’ve put off calling him long enough.

He answers on the first ring, and I hear him chewing when he says, “Hey, kid.”

“Hey, Dad.”

I sigh.

“What is it?” he says.

“Did you see the Poison Wood article?”

There’s a pause, then, “I saw it.”

“When?”

“A few days ago.”

I swirl the ice cube in my empty glass. “Why didn’t you tell me about it?”

“Oh, Rita.”

“That’s not an answer, Dad.”

“Let it be,” he says, his voice sounding tired. “You’re always wanting a story. That story is over.”

I don’t inform him of the text messages from a stranger that say otherwise.

“She was there, Dad. Heather was at the school the whole time.” I let out a slow breath. “Oh my God.”

“Don’t think about it.”

“How can I not? I was there.” The scotch sours in my stomach. The school was building that addition my senior year. They were calling it a wellness room, but they added it onto the dank basement of all places. “The article says her skull was found in the wall. How is that possible?”

My father built the farmhouse where I grew up. He drew the plans; he organized the subcontractors. If anyone can talk about construction details, it’s him.

“It wasn’t really in the wall just on the outside of it. In Louisiana, basements aren’t commonplace. When they are, you’d damn well better put a French drain in. That’s what the contractor was adding around the perimeter your senior year.”

I remember that ten-foot-deep trench being dug and our headmaster yelling at us all to steer clear of it or someone could get hurt. Is that what happened to Heather? Instead of running off, she slipped and fell in. But if that’s the case, why was a man sitting in prison? Why was a stranger reaching out to me and telling me to be careful?

“My guess is,” my father continues, “in 1919, when the school was built, the architect added that basement as a storm shelter or maybe a place to stay cool when it was a hundred degrees outside. Either way, he’s lucky the elevation is a little higher in that part of the Kisatchie. Otherwise that school would have had a pool under it instead of a basement.”

Was it lucky, though? That basement is turning out to be nothing but trouble.

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From Poison Wood by Jennifer Moorhead. Copyright © 2025 by the author and reprinted by permission.

Poison Wood by Jennifer Moorhead was published today October 28 2025 by Thomas & Mercer and is available from all good booksellers, including