FICTION · LOVE
Jane Orcutt
Award-winning Christian author Jane Orcutt was born on January 25th, 1960, in Fort Worth, Texas. Born with a serious heart defect, Jane faced surgeries and long recoveries from the age of five. But these solitary times only strengthened Jane’s love for reading, and her dream of one day becoming a writer. Jane achieved that dream with style, not only as a popular Christian novelist with fourteen published books to her credit, but also through her mentorship of many young writers. Throughout Jane’s life, she enjoyed writing about her home state of Texas. She was particularly talented at breathing life into historical time periods and she brought a fresh view of the bluebonnet state to her readers worldwide. As a University of Texas graduate, she possessed a broad range of writing and editing skills, which she used in her own writing, as a production worker for an Austin television station, and as an editor for a Forth Worth publishing company. In 1982, Jane married Bill Orcutt. They had two sons, Colin and Sam, whom Jane homeschooled until they reached high school. Jane often stated that this accomplishment was her pride and joy. She was passionate about helping her sons explore their interests and intellect while allowing them to grow into individual men of their own account. Jane was a loyal and loving wife, mother, daughter, and sister, a witty and sought-after friend, a powerful writer, and a tender pet owner. Most of all Jane was a follower and lover of Jesus Christ. On Sunday, March 18, 2007, after a long battle with acute myeloid leukemia, Jane stepped into the arms of her Savior. She now rests safely in His arms, while her powerful legacy lives on through her family and through her books.
BOTH DETECTIVES had children of their own.
— from Lullaby, 1989
Most acclaimed
Lullaby
1989
"Carl Streator is a solitary widower and fortyish newspaper reporter who is assigned to do a series of articles on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In the course of this investigation, he discovers an ominous thread: the presence on the scenes of these deaths of the anthology Poems and Rhymes Around the World, opened to the page where there appears an African chant or "culling song." This song turns out to be lethal when spoken or even thought in anyone's direction - and once it lodges in Streator's brain, he finds himself becoming an involuntary serial killer. So he teams up with a real estate broker, one Helen Hoover Boyle, who specializes in selling haunted (or "distressed") houses (wonderfully high turnover), and who lost a child to the culling song years before. Together they set out on a cross-country odyssey. Their goal is to remove all copies of the book from libraries, lest this deadly verbal virus spread and wipe out human life. Accompanying them on their road trip are Helen's assistant, Mona Sabbat, an exquisitely earnest Wiccan, and her sardonic ecoterrorist boyfriend, Oyster, who is running a scam involving fake liability claims and business blackmail. Welcome to the new nuclear family."--BOOK JACKET.