ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Pat Dunlap Evans was born in Michigan but “got to Texas as soon as I could.” Her family lived in San Antonio and later Dallas, where she attended South Oak Cliff High School and Southern Methodist University. Pat eventually completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English at University of Missouri, Kansas City, with emphasis on creative writing. She also taught freshman writing courses as a part-time lecturer.

After a divorce, Pat stressed her way as a single mom through twenty-five years of high-stress advertising and marketing roles before retiring to write fiction and screenplays. She lives in the Lake Travis area with her second husband Dr. Bill Evans, and enjoys travel, golf, volunteer work, sailing, and the chaos of the couple’s combined five adult children, five grandchildren and two Cockalier dogs.

Pat has published two novels, with a third, Those Who Try, due out soon.

10.14.18

FICTION

Pat Dunlap Evans

Out and In: A Novel

A. M. Chai Literary

Paperback, 978-0-9968822-2-4; 316 pages, $11.99. Also available in ebook formats.

April 2016

Austin author Pat Dunlap Evans had specific goals in mind when she penned this book, her second: “I wanted to try my hand at a page-turner mystery with a female protagonist. I also wanted to use my long-ago experiences as an NFL wife as a backdrop for a novel.”

Her mystery-thriller Out and In succeeds on those fronts, and on other fronts as well.

The well-written tale starts quickly and with a bang: a Dallas arts society maven, Marie Donovan, is charged with capital murder and jailed after a famed opera orchestra conductor, Luca Scarlatti, is found dead. Scarlatti, the maestro of the Metroplex Opera, has been shot with Marie’s gun and stabbed with one of her long hairpins, which has a nerve agent on it. Meanwhile, some of Marie’s clothes have gunshot residue. And it is well known that she and the lecherous Scarlatti did get along.

Marie’s situation looks like a slam-dunk case for the prosecution in a city where many residents had been swindled by Marie’s late husband, Cole Donovan. The former Super Bowl–winning pro football quarterback had capitalized on his fame to encourage bad investments, and then apparently killed himself.

From there, the complications and implications keep getting deeper for Marie, including searing publicity in the widely read “Out and In” gossip column, written for a local newspaper and website by Terrance Nichols, “a gossip and a liar,” as Marie describes him. “He and the Dallas Daily Herald are always being sued for libel.”

Almost all of Marie’s society friends soon shun her. Her fate is left mostly in the hands of her lawyer, Ryan Ingles, and a licensed private investigator, Billy Bob Hughes, whose nickname is “Nasty Man.”

Author Evans has a fine ear for entertaining dialogue, and the use of short chapters helps her mystery-thriller keep moving briskly, even though the plot includes several side angles.

For example, some of the male characters have known each other for decades and played football together on collegiate or professional teams. Some of the female characters have had their marriages imperiled or wrecked by their husbands’ sports fame. And cash-flow problems abound. Some of the seemingly wealthy characters lost big money in Cole Donovan’s Ponzi scheme and haven’t completely recovered. Marie herself is now using money from a home equity loan to cover her bail and living expenses, and she may have to sell the house to survive.

Meanwhile, Marie, Ryan and Nasty Man must try to find Scarlatti’s real killer, so Marie won’t take the fall.

Out and In is told in first person, with Marie often revealing her innermost emotions. She has mixed feelings about those helping or shunning her and worries how her two young-adult sons will be affected both by her ordeal and by their dishonest father’s death. The killer and a co-conspirator also get turns to speak their minds without giving themselves away. And the book’s surprise ending wisely leaves pathways for a sequel.

Pat Dunlap Evans’s first book, To Leave a Memory, has been described as a “heartwarming story of a troubled family’s victory over a devastating tragedy.” Out and In is a fast-paced mystery-thriller with heart, soul, sex, and hope, as well as murder.

* * * * *