Jennifer Patrick's Novel "The Night She Died" Part of Writer's Long, Satisfying Journey

What do you get when you combine a coming-of-age tale with a small-town murder mystery? You get The Night She Died, the first published novel by UGA College of Education alumna Jennifer Patrick. The book has just been published by Soho Press in New York .

The novel came out of Patrick's experiences when she lived in Winder, a small town about 40 miles east of Atlanta .

“I was looking for a job at that point, so I had a lot of free time on my hands and was very bored,” said Patrick, who also has worked for the COE's Test Scoring and Reporting Services. “I was just hanging out and watching people, and I became very interested in watching the interactions and tensions between the locals and the bedroom commuters, a theme that I explore in the novel.”

The book is a sharply realized story that turns a young woman's search for identity into a tragedy that a small-town policeman must solve.

“One day I walked into the local CD store and rock music was blaring, and the teenaged boy who worked there was showing a fifty-something female mail carrier how to do a down-and-dirty kind of dance,” said Patrick. “The look on the woman's face when I walked in was priceless. You could tell she thought that her reputation was ruined. The boy seemed like the sort that would enjoy ruining reputations, and from him I got the idea for my central character, Sterling . The rest of the book just sort of wrote itself.”

Though this is Patrick's debut novel, she has been writing all her life.

“I have wanted to be a writer since childhood when I started creating collections of short stories for my younger brother,” she said. “I wrote my first novel – a very bad one! – at the age of 13.”

Since then, she has been a regular part of many writer's groups and attended conferences and classes, honing her art and craft. The Night She Died went through eight drafts before Patrick's literary agent sold it to Soho Press in 2003.

Patrick, 37, was born in Durham, N.C., where her father was a computer science professor at Duke University and her mother a teacher. She received her bachelor's degree in English and psychology from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in 1988, and a master's in English with a concentration in creative writing from UGA in 1992. She also earned a M.Ed. degree from UGA in 1997 in counseling and human development.

She has been employed at UGA since 1992 as a financial aid counselor and as a program specialist in the Graduate School graduation office. Since June 2003 she has been an academic advisor in UGA's Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.

Patrick has published journalism in such places as Athens Magazine and the Athens Banner-Herald and has had essays featured on Georgia Public Radio. Among her favorite writers are John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Southern favorites include Terry Kay, Larry Brown and Judith Ortiz Cofer.

“What really helped me to become a writer has been rewriting, rewriting and more rewriting,” said Patrick, “then giving the book to honest and blunt critics and rewriting again.”

The plot of the novel is intricate, ratcheting up the level of tension as it goes.

Thirty-year-old Lara Walton flees Washington, D.C., and her lover's tragic death in a car accident. She happens upon the small town of Winston, Ga., where she falls in love with an old Victorian house. She purchases the house, planning to renovate it as a way to get away from her past and to work through her grief.

When she hires 17-year-old Sterling O'Connor, a local kid with a bad reputation, to help her with the house, rumors fly through the small community. Sterling 's boss, Eric Teague, finds himself developing a romantic interest in Lara. Eric has been almost like a big brother to Sterling since the boy's father abandoned the family when Sterling was just 14. Eric worries about escalating tensions in the town caused by Lara's developing friendship with Sterling and her obvious concern for his family situation.

Then only a few months after her arrival, Lara is murdered in her bedroom in the old house, shot six times. Police captain Jimmy Edgars is assigned to the case, but he hasn't worked a murder in eight years, and even he doubts his ability to determine fact from rumor and solve the crime.

“In its essence, The Night She Died combines a coming-of age tale with small town murder mystery,” said Patrick. “I hope readers will find it a rich and satisfying tale.”

For more information on the book and other Soho Press titles, visit www.sohopress.com. Also Jennifer Patrick is available to readers and fans through her website www.jpatrickbooks.com.

Thursday, May 20, 2004

WRITER : Phil Williams , 706/542-8501, phil@franklin.uga.edu
CONTACT: Jennifer Patrick, 706/542-1523, jlpatrick@franklin.uga.edu