As both a licensed real estate agent and someone who has ripped out drywall herself, Jennie Bentley writes about what she knows, decorating it in a palate of romantic colors with just enough dark accents to provide tension. She spoke with Chapter 16 about her third romantic Do-It-Yourself mystery, Plaster and Poison, as well as her upcoming real-estate mystery series set in Nashville, before launching a multi-stop book tour around the state.
National Book Award winner Bob Shacochis is a breed apart, one of the last survivors of the glory days of magazine fiction and feature writing, the age when writers were bold and swaggering and confident and even a little dangerous—a ruddy, bearded wild man of the mountains, an intrepid travel writer and war correspondent, and a consummate prose stylist. He speaks with Chapter 16 in advance of his Nashville appearance at Montgomery Bell Academy on March 1.
In Woods Runner, Gary Paulsen creates a tale that returns to the wilderness of his beloved Hatchet but takes it back in time to the Revolutionary War. “I wanted to dispute the mythic, clean, even antiseptic qualities in many histories, because war is never, not ever, clean,” he writes. He will read at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville on March 2. Prior to the visit, he took some time to correspond by email with Chapter 16.
J.T. Ellison‘s fourth mystery novel The Cold Room once again features Nashville homicide detective Taylor Jackson. This time around, Jackson’s investigation takes her into the twisted horrors of necrophilia and then through a macabre chase involving reenactments of famous paintings both here and in Europe. Ellison talks with Chapter 16 about Nashville, her writing, and the delights of research, which in her case includes some quality time with Nashville’s boys in blue.
Memphis writer Richard Bausch has long been known as a master of macho, a chronicler of men. But as his latest story collection, Something Is Out There, demonstrates, Bausch is, if anything, a master of the anti-macho, a writer who digs beneath the tough exterior of his protagonists—male and female alike—to find their fears, weaknesses, and dreams.
To review a book with Jane Austen at its heart is, for a passionate Austen fan, a risky endeavor. The subject is powerfully attractive, but the risk of disappointment is huge: few writers have the requisite respect and skill to follow in Austen’s footsteps. In Mr. Darcy Broke My Heart, Nashville resident Beth Pattillo passes the test with a romance that will appeal to non-Austenites, as well. Pattillo appears at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on February 11 at 7 p.m.
