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Jess Walter is a New York Times bestselling American author who has written around 8 books in his career. He is well known to write his novels based on a variety of genres, including the mystery, thriller, nonfiction, literature and fiction genres. His success as an international author can be understood from the fact that he was the finalist for the National Book Award in the year 2006 and winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award in the year 2005. Jess was also the finalist for the PEN and the USA Literary prize for his writing works based on fiction and nonfiction. He has been able to publish his work in more than 30 foreign languages and sell them all over the world. Many of the short fiction stories written by Jess have featured in the Harper’s, Esquire, Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, and many more. The essays, journalism, and criticism written by author Jess Walter have been widely published in The Washington Post, Playboy, the Los Angeles Times, Details, Newsweek, The Boston Globe, etc. Apart from writing fiction and nonfiction books, he also writes screenplays. In the year 1996, he co-wrote the bestseller play, In Contempt along with author Christopher Darden. Jess was born on June 20, 1965 in Spokane, Washington, United States. He started his writing career in the year 2001 and went on to publish around 8 novels till now.
In the year 2013, he shifted his focus towards writing short stories and wrote a couple of them in the same year. Maureen Corrigan from the NPR’s Fresh Air has described the latest novel written by Jess as a literary miracle, some others have described it as a book full of piercing wit and pathos, and have regarded it as a generous soul of a classic novel. Because of such positive reviews the novel became very much successful and went on to feature in the New York Times bestseller list. One of the screenplays written by author Jess includes a possible adaptation of his 2009 novel ‘The Financial Lives of the Poets’. He has often been described by many critics to have written new style of thriller novels, which not only contain the conscience, but are also full of insights into the culture of the present world, especially the post 9/11 world. Apart from being an author, Jess also works as a journalist. He has covered the Ruby Ridge/Randy Weaver case as a reporter when he was working for the Spokesman-Review newspaper agency in Spokane. Jess has also written a book based on the case. As of today, he lives along with Anne and 3 children named Brooklyn, Alec, and Ava in his childhood hometown, Spokane in Washington. As a child, he graduated from the East Valley High School in Spokane and then went on to complete his college studies from the Eastern Washington University.
Most of the novels written by author Jess Walter are in the form of standalone books, but he has written a few of them in the form of a series. The series is known as the ‘Caroline Mabry’ series and consists of 2 novels published in the years 2001 and 2003. Both the novels of the series feature the main character in the form of Caroline Mabry, who has been described by the author as a police detective situated in Spokane, Washington. The first novel of the series was published by the Harper Perennial publishing house in the year 2001. It was titled ‘Over Tumbled Graves’ and introduced the character of Caroline Mabry as a police detective. The plot of this novel seems to be rich with the dark and muted colors of the skies of the Pacific Northwest. Its unique plot and interesting helped author Jess to establish himself as a novelist with an extraordinary dimension and emotional depth. In the opening sequence of the plot of the novel, detective Caroline Mabry is depicted as being involved in a normal drug bust, when she finds herself face to face with a brutal killer on a narrow bridge near the white water falls. After a few hours of the her encounter with the murderer, she is informed about the discovery of a dead body of a young sex worker along the nearby bank of the river. The following plot of the novel allows the readers to be confronted by their fascination with murder and pathology, and stares them down till the very end of the novel. Detective Caroline Mabry is joined by a cynical partner named Alan Dupree and the two are thrown into the investigation related to a serial killer. After a lot of hard work they become successful in uncovering some hard to believe realities about their profession and also about each other. Caroline Mabry and Alan Dupree also come to know that the serial killer had the habit of communicating by murdering women.
The second novel of the Caroline Mabry series written by author Jess Walter was published under the title ‘Land of the Blind’. This novel was published by the Harper Perennial publishing house in the year 2003. This novel seems to be darkly funny and fiendishly clever as author Jess tries to speak deeply about the compromises and the bonds that we make during our childhood days, as well as the deadly errors that are bound to happen at any point of our lives. In the opening sequence of the plot of the novel, the main protagonist Caroline Mabry is depicted as working in the night shift during a weekend, when she encounters a charming but seemingly unstable words from the mouth of a criminal who agrees to confess the crimes that he has committed, in front of her. Caroline is known to be a weary detective in the Spokane police department. She senses that something is not right with the happening, but she proceeds ahead. The criminal insists that he will write the confession in longhand rather than speaking from his mouth. In the next 48 hours that follow after the confession, the strange criminal admits not just to his crimes, but gives out an entire detail about his life, which appears as a haunting tale of politics and poverty, and of revenge and obsession. As the stranger continues to write his confession, detective Caroline Mabry tries to race against time to investigate a murder mystery and the story of the dark and the intertwined lives of a couple of men. In doing so, she unknowingly pushes herself nearly to her collapse.
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