Crime and Cheerleading: Author Event with Karen Parkman

“With this powerhouse debut, Karen Parkman has established herself as a brilliant new voice in fiction. The Jills is both a page-turning mystery and a moving portrait of sisterhood, offering a glimpse behind the scenes of NFL cheerleading and a fictional New York crime syndicate." —Lauren Ling Brown, bestselling author of Society of Lies

A Buffalo Bills cheerleader will stop at nothing to solve the disappearance of her best friend and teammate, navigating the dark underbelly of a hardscrabble city, the grime and glamour of professional cheerleading, and her own tangled family history. The novel is reminiscent of Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll, and is perfect for fans of thrillers that are written by women, for women. The Jills is a woman's tale of discovering her own strength in a system built by and for men.

Karen Parkman holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The Jills has been supported by MacDowell and Yaddo fellowships, the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, and the Vermont Studio Center. Parkman’s stories have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Joyland, and other outlets. She is based in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Claire Lombardo is the author of the nationally-bestselling novel Same As It Ever Was. Her debut, The Most Fun We Ever Had, was an instant New York Times bestseller and a Reese's Book Club pick. Her short fiction has appeared in, among others, Playboy, Barrelhouse Magazine, Little Fiction, and Longform. Her story, "I Only Want to Talk About the Nice Things," was one of 2016's Best of the Net, and was #1 on Longform's 2015 fiction list. She lives in Minneapolis.

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