Patti Lacy

In 2005, Patti traded in her grade books for a writer's pen to tell the long-buried story of her best friend. "An Irishwoman's Tale," "What the Bayou Saw," and "The Rhythm of Secrets" explore the secrets women keep and why they keep them. Patti's fourth book, "Reclaiming Lily," from Bethany House, transports readers to a Chinese orphanage, where two cultures and two women collide. Claiming influences as diverse as Francine Rivers and Jodi Piccoult, Patti weaves stories of grace that have in their fiber real-life incidents.

In 2014, Patti partnered with Sara Richardson and Angie Reedy to capture the poignant memoir of a sharecropper's daughter, "Jessie's Pearls." Patti and Angie next stuck close to their hometown of Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, where a local ministry, Jesus House, and one of its founders, Bonnie K. Lentz, came to life on the pages of a second memoir, "Tattooed by Jesus" and a follow-up book, "Stories From the Jesus House."

Then Tony Daniels, a Marine who served Vietnam and a former detective with the Normal Police Department, teamed up with Patti to write "Thin Line: A Detective's Reckoning with the Dark Side of the Justice System." "Thin Line" is a braided memoir that follows Daniels' reckoning with his own demons, a justice system capable of destroying innocent lives, and his own complicity in one of Illinois's most controversial wrongful convictions. Drawing on six notebooks of interviews, court documents, and years of investigation, Patti weaves a gripping true crime narrative with a deeply human story of conscience, doubt, and redemption.

For readers of "Black Tunnel, White Magic" and "Just Mercy", "Thin Line" offers a searing look at the line between justice and injustice, guilt and innocence, duty and truth.