Jessica Hatchigan, who writes as J. R. Hatchigan, moved to Chelsea from a Detroit suburb seven years ago. When she and her husband moved to Chelsea, Hatchigan had wound down a career as a corporate speechwriter, and then as a solopreneur specializing in editorial services. She wanted to concentrate again on her creative writing, something she’d set aside for decades; before she started the corporate phase of her career, she was a freelance journalist with two children’s books published by Harper Collins’s Avon Camelot imprint.
As she worked on her mystery novel, Hatchigan ended up making several false starts. Then one day a character – or more specifically, a character’s voice – popped into her head.
“It was the voice of a person who suffers from PTSD and unresolved grief,” Hatchigan says.
A member of Moms Demand Action, Hatchigan believes this was a creative way for her to channel some of her frustration about gun control issues. The character whose voice she heard was Joe Novak, the narrator of her new novel, The Man Who Was Like a Dog with a Bone. In a fictional setting, Joe is able to pursue justice for a mass killing that destroyed his family.
“It’s a sad story, of course,” Hatchigan says, “but while my narrator is angry and determined, he’s not bitter. He’s retained a bleak sense of humor and that’s woven into the narration.”
Despite finding the voice for her narrator, “Writing the book wasn’t easy,” Hatchigan says. “It took me four years and countless revisions to complete it.”
The action in Hatchigan’s novel, a mystery set in California, takes place during the Christmas season.
“It’s set during the days leading up to Christmas and it ends on Christmas Eve. I set the book during the Christmas season because it underscores the novel’s theme of coping with loss of family, something you feel especially deeply during the holidays.”
Her character pushes for accountability, hoping to seek justice for his loss.
“Joe is determined to get accountability,” she says. “He uses his profession as a reporter to be a gadfly to the powerful man he feels could have prevented the tragedy – it’s a David and Goliath story in that sense.”
The novel’s narrator has roots in Michigan but the action takes place in California.
“I visited California for the first time on a business trip for one of the auto companies,” Hatchigan says, “and when I stepped out of the airport in January, my cheeks were still raw from our Michigan winter. Then I saw flowers blooming in outdoor containers. I fell in love with the place.”
A business dinner later that day at the Moonshadows restaurant in Malibu, with its stunning views of the Pacific, cemented that love, as did later visits to her grown daughter and son-in-law, VFX artists and techies who live in Glendale, California. A memorable trip she and her husband took about ten years ago in a rented van, driving from L. A. to San Francisco on the Pacific Coast Highway, with its ocean view all along the way, further reinforced her love of the West Coast.
As her work on the novel drew to a close, Hatchigan had a decision to make – whether to send the work to an agent or not.
“The agent who’d loved my work and repped my children’s books years ago, had died,” she says. “I thought about it and decided I didn’t want to spend months finding a new agent. Besides that, my solopreneurship genes kicked in and I opted to take a small-business approach and to produce and launch my work under my own imprint. It helped that I’ve produced and edited books for corporate clients. I knew the process from beginning to final product.”
The book passes the Grisham test, Hatchigan says.
“There is some salty language in the novel because it’s written in the first person and the narrator is a twenty-something guy and the action takes place in the present day, so I’ve kept it real,” she said. “But John Grisham has a guideline I follow – namely, not write anything that would embarrass my mother or my children. My novel goes to some dark places, but I believe it passes the Grisham test.”
The Man Who Was Like a Dog with a Bone is now available from Amazon in ebook and paperback.