Tiffany McDaniel

On the Savage Side grew from a real case: six women who vanished from Chillicothe, Ohio, several of them later found in the water; one case ended in a conviction and the other five are still open. Tiffany McDaniel, raised in southern Ohio, built the novel around twin sisters Arcade and Daffodil Doggs, whose lives are shaped by addiction and by the river that keeps giving up the dead. She is a poet and a visual artist as well as a novelist, and describes her writing as rooted in her Cherokee ancestry. Her first published novel, The Summer That Melted Everything, took the Guardian's Not the Booker prize in 2016. Betty followed in 2020, retelling the girlhood of her own mother, Betty Carpenter, and collecting the Ohioana readers' vote and the Society of Midland Authors fiction prize. France made her a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2021. She also writes a middle grade fantasy series, The Wand Keepers.