Santa Rosa author makes bone-chilling debut with new thriller novel
‘This is where I got the idea,” Heather Chavez says while driving along Chanate Road in Santa Rosa on a recent weekday morning.
The stretch was part of her work-to-home commute for more than two decades. To the right, abandoned Chanate Hospital buildings seem at risk of being overtaken by the woods surrounding them. The property once housed a juvenile hall, county morgue and coroner's office. Just the sight of the lone security guard standing watch gives a sense of a place where bad things could happen.
And happen they do in Chavez's new novel “No Bad Deed,” which will be released Tuesday. The debut marks a major accomplishment for Chavez, following years of writing novels that went unpublished and sometimes even struggling to pay bills. For the thriller, Chavez drew from her everyday life, her role as a mom and her home of Santa Rosa, including that spooky span of Chanate Road where the novel opens.
Good intentions
“If my kids had been with me, it wouldn't have happened,” says Chavez's protagonist, Cassie Larkin, as the story begins. It's a rainy night and Cassie is driving home when she sees two dark figures dart across a stretch of Chanate Road. Cassie pulls over in time to see a man and woman arguing and struggling. After dialing 911, Cassie watches the man throw the woman down an embankment as they disappear into a creek bed.
Despite the 911 dispatcher's warning, Cassie gets out of her minivan, compelled to help. It's a riveting opening scene that grabs the reader by the collar and doesn't let go for 309 pages.
“That setting came to me almost fully formed. I knew that was where that scene was going to take place,” says Chavez, 50, a wife and working mother with two children, just like Cassie.
The fast-paced, twisty thriller is an example of what happens when good intentions yield very bad results. When Cassie, an overworked veterinarian suffering from severe parental guilt, intervenes in what she thinks is a roadside domestic dispute, the man gives her an ultimatum: “Let her die and I'll let you live.” Instead, she chooses to stay with the victim while the man steals her car, purse and personal information. When Cassie's husband disappears the next day, on Halloween, her children are soon in danger and she must summon a strength she never knew she had to save her family.
“She's autobiographical to an extent,” Chavez says of her main character. “As a working mom, I definitely felt the parental guilt.” A newspaper copy editor for 15 years, she often spent more nights, weekends and holidays with co-workers than with family.
“Some of that internal angst I definitely feel. If something like that happened to my family, it's my ideal of what I could do. Would I really be willing and able to do it?”
The novel's opening scene was inspired by a real-life incident Chavez witnessed while picking up her daughter one afternoon at Comstock Middle School.
“I saw a boy walking down this slope, and suddenly two other boys ran up to him and started punching him,” she remembers. “It was a split-second decision - what do I do? I've got my daughter in the car. Do I call 911? Do I get out of the car? All these thoughts ran through my mind. It ended in just a second, before I could even make a decision about it. Then of course for the rest of the day, being a writer, the rest of the day I'm thinking, ‘Why did that happen?'”
Persistence pays
Chavez's modest two-story house a few blocks off Brush Creek Road in Rincon Valley today looks like the set of an HGTV remodeling show: plastic sheeting lines the staircase, all the windows in the house are being replaced, including a broken one that was patched with cardboard because Chavez and her huband Alex couldn't afford to fix it. The living room has been remodeled with a new fireplace. Above it, a new 75-inch TV replaces the 45-inch model that died the same morning Chavez's agent called to tell her he sold her book.
Chavez still remembers, a little more than a decade ago, when the family budget was so tight they pondered whether to pay the water or electric bill.
The improvements are made possible by Chavez's book deal. After nearly three decades of writing unpublished novels, what she calls her three “practice books,” she struck gold when she signed a two-book deal with William Morrow in 2018 for just under $500,000.
Since then, Chavez's life has grown more comfortable, yet more complicated. Four days a week, she works in public affairs at Kaiser Permanente. Fridays are her big writing days, as she tries to make headway on her second novel. Once again, she's following a strong female protagonist - this time a single mom and convicted felon who jumps at a shot at redemption when an eccentric billionaire invites her to compete in a contest.
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