Benny Westcott
Chris Patchell, author of four crime thrillers set in Sweet Home, recently won a Readers’ Favorite 2023 Bronze Medal for Best Crime Fiction. Her entry, “Hide Her”, is the fourth book in the Lacey James detective series. James is a small-town cop struggling to solve crimes in her hometown of Sweet Home, while trying to keep her crumbling marriage together.
The book also won a Wind Dancer Film Award, which is given to 10 authors whose books are considered top candidates for movie adaptation.
Patchell, a Salem resident and USA Today Best-Selling Author who has published 11 books since 2013, set most of her books in the Seattle area before the Lacey James series, having lived there for 16 years before moving to Oregon.
But she decided it would be nice to write something set in a small town that was local, so she started to look around for the right place. She wanted somewhere small and up close to the foothills of the Cascades.
“As I was driving around the area, I happened upon Sweet Home, and there was just something about it that spoke to me. The location was right and I love that it’s right on the edge of Foster Lake. So I chose to set the books there.”
Patchell noted that “The Willamette Valley is so full of beautiful places, so the setting was absolutely perfect. It’s kind of small town and kind of reminded me of the place where I grew up. As I was driving around the streets I thought, this would be the kind of place that somebody would stay in their hometown to be close to their family, and it just had the right feel.”
In the series, the protagonist James has a lot of family connections in Sweet Home.
“It’s one of those things where you connect with your hometown, so she’s got a lot of love for the town,” Patchell said. “I’ve infused a little bit of small town humor, in terms of everybody knows everybody. There’s a local diner that they go to that’s the hotspot for local gossip.”
She said the books “portray a town that is struggling a little bit on the financial side of things. People are blue collar. It’s got a lot of people who’ve been there for a long time.”
Patchell took dozens of trips to Sweet Home in the course of writing the series, “just roaming around, soaking in the atmosphere.”
Because of its small-town setting, deep characters, and bits of humor, readers of the Lacey James books have likened the series to HBO’s Mare of Easttown. The book series has won several awards, including a 2022 Next Generation Indie Book Award and a 2022 Readers’ Favorite Finalist for Best Crime Fiction.
Patchell, 54, is a married mother of two whose full time job is director of program management for a motion graphics software company, where she manages software projects.
Writing has been something she’s always loved, even growing up. “But you know how life gets, you get busy with career, work, kids, all the things,” she said. “But then when I was in my mid to late 30s, I started to think that I needed a little bit of my life that’s mine. Work was super busy and the kids were young, and it felt like I was doing things for everybody else.”
So she remembered that she used to like to write and decided that she would pick it up again. She enrolled in a popular fiction extension program at the University of Washington, and that’s how she wrote her first book.
Born and raised in Eastern Ontario, Canada, she left Vancouver, BC for a job in Seattle. Seven years ago, she settled in Salem with her husband, two kids, and two yappy Yorkies.