Deadly Lies description is this:
Husband and wife stand on opposite sides of a divide created by lies and rooted in a dark and deadly past…
As a teenager, Jill Shannon fell victim to her stepfather's cruel abuse. Now as an adult, Jill's made it - she has a successful career and a solid, if not static, marriage to Detective Alex Shannon. Together they live out what seems to be a perfect life in Seattle.
The vow she made as a teenager to never again be a victim lies dormant - until one day a reporter lures her to his hotel room under the pretense of an interview - and suddenly all of it comes rushing back. Jill seeks revenge on the reporter, triggering a series of events that leads Jill down a wormhole of retribution, forcing her to spin an ever-widening web of lies.
Meanwhile, Alex is pulled into a case of a series of murders that began as cyber relationships. There seems to be a familiar fingerprint on these crimes, but Alex refuses to believe the murderer could be someone close to him…
“Chris Patchell”s debut novel, Deadly Lies, is a taut, fast-paced thriller that grabs you from the start and doesn’t let go. Patchell is a master storyteller with a real talent for creating pulse-pounding suspense.”—Kevin O’Brien, New York Times Bestselling Author of Unspeakable.
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Guest Post:
Jill Shannon – Not the Girl Next Door
When I sat down to write DEADLY LIES, I didn’t intend to write Jill Shannon, the kind of antihero protagonist that people loved to hate. But you know what they say; sometimes the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The truth is, I don’t know why I love writing bad guys, but I do. Maybe it has something to do with the morally dubious characters I loved watching as a kid. Larger than life characters like Dirty Harry Callahan and Han Solo who get the right things done while swaggering down a dangerously crooked line between doing good and complete and utter disaster.
Besides, bad guys always have the best lines, the best vices, and like Scar from the Lion King, the best songs.
At the heart of the story, DEADLY LIES is a book about a woman with a secret life. Paragons of society typically don’t have secret lives, and if they do, they’re not as wholesome as they appear. So I knew from the start I had to create a character who was complicated, flawed, and memorable. A tall order. And true to form, Jill Shannon is a hot mess of contradictions.
She’s a woman in a male-dominated environment, willing to use all the tools in her arsenal to get what she wants. She’s married to a great guy, but is embroiled in an affair with her handsomely wicked boss. She’s a woman who is attacked and strikes back with lethal force.
Ethical? Sweet? Not exactly. But is she interesting? Hell yes!
Like the not-so-good doctor, Hannibal Lecter, Jill’s character was formed early. We learn in Thomas Harris’ novel, HANNIBAL, that Lecter was warped by the tragic and brutal death of his sister years before, when Hannibal was just a child. Likewise, Jill’s character is formed by the abuse she suffers at the hands of her stepfather.
Not all girls are made of sugar and spice, and everything nice. Though female antiheros are certainly more rare than their male counterparts, they are not without fictional precedent. Femme fatales of the 1930’s were known for using sexuality and cunning to manipulate men in order to gain power. And like Lisbeth Salander from THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, Jill’s own morale code lands somewhere south of what’s legal.
Antiheros are famous for following their own set of rules. Take Dexter Morgan for example – TV’s most likeable serial killer. Dexter murders people who do bad things to feed his bloodthirsty proclivities. While not the kind of guy I’d want to wake up beside, somehow I can buy the idea that by killing people who hurt other people, Dexter makes the world a better place.
Why do these morally ambiguous characters keep me on the edge of my seat turning pages until the wee hours of the night until I know I’m going to wake up crabby, fully ill-equipped to deal with the rigors of my day? Because they’re realistic, and flawed, loaded with a full complement of contradictions.
So who is Jill Shannon really? Is she a criminal? A vigilante? A hero? A villain? Or is she all of these things? As the author of the story, I’ll leave it for you to decide.
Whatever the case though, I’m a little embarrassed to admit, it’s disturbingly easy to write from Jill’s point of view. I jokingly call her my alter ego. Sometimes when I’m sitting in a meeting that’s going horribly awry, I’ll ask myself what Jill would do. While the question rarely helps get the meeting back on track, the answer always puts a smile on my face.
In the book, DEADLY LIES, Jill’s feet are set squarely on a bloody path to revenge with a promise of more fun to come. To learn more about my writing, or me please visit my website at www.chrispatchell.com.
When Chris Patchell isn’t hiking in the Cascade Mountains or hanging out with family and friends, she is working at her hi-tech job or writing gritty suspense novels. Writing has been a lifelong passion for Chris. She fell in love with storytelling in the third grade when her half-page creative writing assignment turned into a five-page story on vampires. Even back then Chris had a gift for writing intricate plots that were so good her father refused to believe she didn’t steal them from comic books.
Years later, Chris spent long afternoons managing her own independent record store and writing romance novels. After closing the record store and going to college, Chris launched a successful career in hi-tech. She married, had kids but amid all the madness, the itch to write never really went away. So she started writing again. Not romance this time – suspense filled with drama, and angst, speckled with a little bit of blood.
Why suspense? Chris blames her obsession with the dark on two things: watching Stephen King movies as a kid and spending ridiculous amounts of time commuting in Seattle traffic. “My stories are based on scenarios I live every day, distorted through the fictional lens. And my stories come with the added bonus of not having to be restrained by socially acceptable behavior."
To learn more about Chris and her debut novel, DEADLY LIES, visit www.chrispatchell.com/
Join her on Facebook for book giveaways and more gritty fun at www.facebook.com/authorchrispatchell
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This looks like my style of book!
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