Chris Orcutt

CHRIS ORCUTT has written professionally for over 25 years as a fiction writer, journalist, scriptwriter, playwright, technical writer and speechwriter. He has also taught high school U.S. history and college writing. At Baruch College, City University of New York, Chris received the Distinguished Teaching Award, and as a newspaper reporter he received a New York Press Association award.

Chris is the author of the critically acclaimed Dakota Stevens Mystery Series. The first novel in the series, A REAL PIECE OF WORK, achieved a #1 top-rated ranking in Literary Fiction for Kindle, and #4 in Mystery. IndieReader writes of the novel, “Action, lust, danger, style and witty repartee, Orcutt’s A Real Piece of Work is a work of art.”

The novel received similarly strong critical acclaim from other reviewers, as did the sequels, THE RICH ARE DIFFERENT. and A TRUTH STRANGER THAN FICTION.

Although Chris is very proud to have created the Dakota Stevens novels, he considers himself first and foremost a general practitioner in fiction writing, and has written a great deal of non-genre fiction. He has had well over two dozen short stories published in literary journals, and his short fiction has won a few modest awards, most notably 55 Fiction’s World’s Shortest Stories. Chris’s short story collection, THE MAN, THE MYTH, THE LEGEND, was selected by IndieReader as one of the Best Books of 2013.

In April 2014, ONE HUNDRED MILES FROM MANHATTAN, a modern pastoral novel in the tradition of Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, was published. The novel tells the story of Wellington, a fictional wealthy community in Upstate New York, where the village and the surrounding hills conceal tales of love, lust, tragedy and small wars. The novel is ten chapters in length, and each chapter is from a different character’s point of view. These characters include a trophy wife, a medical doctor, a single mother, a contractor/local Casanova, and a Manhattan book editor.

ONE HUNDRED MILES was selected by IndieReader as a Best Book for 2014, and in a review of the novel Kirkus Reviews favorably compared Chris to Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Cheever.

Chris was born in Maine, and although he now lives in Upstate New York, he will always consider himself a Mainer and a New Englander first. He went to college in Boston, earning a degree in philosophy (summa cum laude, Phi Kappa Phi), and has been a lifelong Red Sox fan. His hobbies include golf, chess, movies and travel.

For more about Chris, visit his website: www.orcutt.net

For more about the Dakota Stevens Mysteries Series, visit www.orcutt.net OR www.dakotapi.com.