Katie Estill is a graduate of Kenyon College and has an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the author of two novels, Evening Would Find Me and Dahlia's Gone.
Laura Benedict interviewed her at Notes from the Handbasket.One exchange from the interview:
LB: Dahlia’s Gone could be described as a literary crime novel. Did you set out to specifically write a crime novel, or did the story evolve into one?
KE: I wrote Dahlia’s Gone because I wanted to write that story, and it was about a murder, but the novel also came from the context of my life. At the time, I was head of a county task force, and our mission was to reduce violence against women, so I was interacting with all sorts of people I’d never known before. Law enforcement officers, for one. I came to empathize with their experience as human beings, who, for the most part, are basically doing social work, but the kind that’s sometimes very dangerous. So these things were made real to me, not just as ideas. And also, in the small town atmosphere in which I live, if a young woman is murdered, it’s quite possible that you’ve brushed shoulders with at least one of the parents, and so you are more affected by these incidents. I became emotionally engaged.
Read
the full interview.
Learn more about the author and her work at
Katie Estill's website.
Dahlia's Gone has been nominated for the
Hammett Prize by the North American Branch of the International Association of Crime Writers.
The Page 99 Test: Dahlia's Gone.
(h/t to
The Rap Sheet.)
--Marshal Zeringue
