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Terry Shames has long been associated with the slow-burning suspense and morally shaded charm of rural Texas. Her Samuel Cradock mystery series—eleven books strong—has made the fictional town of Jarrett Creek feel less like a setting and more like a lived-in truth. But in her latest novel, Out of Control, Shames leaves the heat-warped blacktop of Texas behind. She steps, instead, into the fog of Northern California and the even murkier realm of religious cults, psychological trauma, and the painstaking reclamation of selfhood.
It’s a bold shift, both thematically and geographically. Yet for Shames, whose fiction has always pivoted around the quiet battle between personal agency and communal inertia, Out of Control feels less like a departure than a natural evolution. The novel centers on Julie Heller, a young woman clawing her way out of the mental and emotional clutches of a fundamentalist cult. San Francisco, where she relocates in search of freedom and identity, is not just a change of scenery but a battleground for autonomy.
The novel’s origin story is as uncanny as the narrative itself. During a brief tenure in real estate, Shames encountered a couple—an older man and his much younger wife—who left an indelible mark. “Whatever little Julie wants, little Julie can have,” the man cooed. “It just creeped me out,” Shames recalls. The phrase, drenched in patronizing control, lingered in her psyche for years, germinating slowly into the complex character of Julie Heller. That discomfort, that sharp instinct that something was not right, is the soul of Out of Control.
If the premise sounds premeditated, the writing process was anything but. Shames eschews outlines, preferring to plunge into a manuscript with only the thinnest thread of inspiration. “I write just straight out,” she says. “I don’t really think about what’s gonna be happening down the line.” For Shames, discovery is the essence of writing—plot emerges, characters solidify, and meaning crystallizes only after the work begins. It’s a rhythm that stands in stark contrast to the procedural rigor of her protagonist Cradock, a retired police chief whose moral compass and investigative patience anchor her long-running series.
Julie Heller, by contrast, is emotionally untethered. She is a woman searching for her place in a world she was never taught to navigate. Her tentative first steps toward independence echo a broader theme in Shames’s work: how people—especially women—reclaim power in spaces designed to suppress them. “It’s a book about how a woman can take her power,” Shames says, “can grow into her ability to take on the world.”
This emphasis on female empowerment arrives not as a slogan, but as a carefully constructed emotional arc. While Samuel Cradock inspires admiration—“Women wanna marry him and men wanna be him,” Shames quips—Julie commands empathy. Her struggle is internal, psychological, and steeped in the vulnerabilities of leaving one’s past behind without knowing what lies ahead.
For a writer so closely identified with rural Texas, the novel’s San Francisco setting might seem like alien terrain. But Shames knows the area intimately, having worked in real estate in Marin County, and it provides a fitting contrast: sprawling, secular, and superficially free. Yet even here, Julie must navigate subtle forms of manipulation, lingering trauma, and the complex politics of selfhood in a city of reinvention.
Despite—or perhaps because of—the tonal shift, Out of Control resonated powerfully with Shames’s editor, who returned the manuscript with an astonishing note: no edits. “She said, ‘I have no notes for you,’” Shames recalls with a mix of pride and disbelief. The book was later selected as an Amazon Editor’s Pick, an endorsement that reflects not just the strength of the narrative, but its relevance in a time when discussions around agency, coercion, and female autonomy are both urgent and overdue.
Still, Shames’s relationship with writing remains deeply personal and delightfully idiosyncratic. Her characters, she says, don’t speak to her directly—”They talk to each other, but not to me”—and while she admits that they sometimes hijack the narrative, she remains a clear-eyed steward of their arcs. One minor character in her third Cradock novel grew so large in her imagination that she had to be trimmed in revision. “She was not an important part of the book, so I had to really cut her back.”
This editorial discipline is hard-won. Though Shames writes up to 2,000 words a day in her first draft phase, she also knows that much of that early material must be discarded. “You put all kinds of crap in there,” she says bluntly. “I call them golden words. You had to dig out your golden words and throw ’em out.” It’s a process that results in four or five drafts per book—a combination of instinct and sweat, of improvisation honed by craft.
Shames is no stranger to risk. Her most recent Cradock novel tackles the overturning of Roe v. Wade, a subject she didn’t approach lightly. “I don’t care,” she says, when asked about potential backlash. “I have to write it.” It’s a sentiment that echoes one of her guiding maxims: “If what you write isn’t making somebody uncomfortable, you’re doing it wrong.”
There’s a quiet audacity to Shames’s work, a willingness to enter difficult spaces without flinching. Whether she’s mapping the sociopolitical contours of small-town justice or tracing the tender recovery of a woman haunted by spiritual abuse, her novels consistently probe the fault lines of power and vulnerability.
With Out of Control, Terry Shames steps into unfamiliar territory and plants her flag with unshakable conviction. It’s a novel born of unease, shaped by empathy, and anchored by a belief in human resilience. In moving beyond Jarrett Creek, she’s expanded not only her fictional universe, but the emotional register of her work. For longtime readers and newcomers alike, the message is clear: wherever Shames leads, it’s worth following.
Learn more about Terry Shames at TerryShames.com.
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