Lise McClendon

Lise McClendon is an American crime writer based in Montana who has built a career writing crime fiction rooted in the American West and in Europe. She is best known for two series that reflect her bicultural interests: the Alix Thorssen art crime series set in Wyoming, and the Bennett Sisters Mysteries set in the southwest of France. Both series draw on McClendon’s love of art, landscape, and the particular textures of regional life, whether in the American West or rural Europe.

The Alix Thorssen series, beginning with The Bluejay Shaman (1994), features a female art gallery owner and ski instructor in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, who investigates crimes connected to the art world and the complex social dynamics of the American West. The series was praised for its sense of place and its protagonist’s appealing combination of artistic sensibility and pragmatic toughness. McClendon uses the Wyoming setting to explore themes of land use, indigenous culture, and the tensions between preservation and development that animate much of the American West.

The Bennett Sisters Mysteries, beginning with Sweet Poison (2013), take a different tone — lighter, more comic, and steeped in the pleasures of French food, wine, and landscape. The series follows a group of American sisters who inherit a dilapidated house in Gascony and become entangled in local mysteries, and it has been embraced by readers who love the combination of European setting, female friendship, and cozy mystery plotting. McClendon writes the French countryside with evident love and knowledge, and her characters feel genuinely embedded in their adoptive community.

McClendon has also written standalone thrillers and has been active in the crime writing community as an organizer and advocate. She has been recognized with award nominations for her series work and is regarded as a dependable and talented practitioner of regional crime fiction on both sides of the Atlantic. Her dual focus on the American West and rural France gives her an unusual perspective within American crime writing.