I almost forgot that I had a book out this month and wanted to say something about it on my blog. I can’t believe I almost let it slip by me when I am so excited to have my first Love Inspired Suspense out his month. I love writing romantic suspense. With LIS I get to write the three elements I love to write the most–romance, suspense (mystery) and faith. It doesn’t get any better than that! Writing Love Inspired Suspense is the best of both worlds.
Hearts on the Line is the sixth and last book in the continuity series, Faith at the Crossroads. Below is some background information about the hero and heroine in Hearts on the Line, available right now at your local bookstore.
Becca Hilliard works as a homicide detective, partnering with Sam Vance. She is also on the negotiation team for the Colorado Springs Police Department. Ever since she was twenty she was responsible for raising her younger brother and sister who at the time of her mother’s death were eight and eleven years old. She quit college in her junior year to take a full-time job and eventually was accepted as a police officer for the CSPD, a dream of hers that formed after her father was killed by a gunman in a bank robbery gone bad. His death led her to apply for the negotiation team and become one of its members. She doesn’t want another family to go through what hers did after her father’s death. Her mother fell apart and a year later was diagnosed with cancer. After a two year battle her mother died, leaving Becca with a ready made family.
The death of both of her parents tested Becca’s floundering faith in the Lord. By the time her mother died a slow painful death, Becca had turned away from God, having in her short life seen too much misery to feel there was a higher being in charge who cares what happens. She preferred to feel she was in charge of her life and vowed from that moment on that she would be in control.
At night Becca takes classes at a local college to help her finish her degree in psychology. She wants to become a counselor one day. She loves working for the police but realizes she can’t step back enough to last a long time in the field. She still gets too emotionally involved in certain cases. With her working in homicide, she can’t always separate herself from the victim and their family, having gone through a similar situation once herself with her father’s murder.
Quinn Montgomery is a rich successful businessman who runs his family business, Montgomery Construction (his father retired leaving him in charge–Quinn prefers working in the renovation part of the company but lately has been overseeing a lot of the bigger construction jobs and the rebuilding of the shop and storage barn). He is a master carpenter who loves to build things with his hands. When he is worried, he likes to disappear into the shop he has at his house and make something. As he creates a beautiful piece of furniture, he feels closer to God, as though he is paying homage to the Lord as he carves the wood. His faith is strong and his ties to his family are, too. Family and God are everything to him.
Without the Lord he wouldn’t have been able to pull himself out of the depth of despair when his fiancee was killed three years before. Maggie Nelson was a member of the bomb squad. One day not a month before they were to be married, she made a wrong move and the bomb she was working on went off. Her death shook Quinn’s world (he threw himself into work to escape the pain). He knew she had a dangerous job, but he risked his heart anyway and fell in love with Maggie (his brother, Brendan, introduced him while he was working for the CSPD).
Quinn still wants a family and a wife, but this time he will be more careful with his heart. First requirement is that the woman he’s interested in has a boring, safe job. Second is that she believes in the Lord. Becca doesn’t fit either of those requirements, but Quinn is intrigued from the beginning when she talks a jumper down from a building his construction company is erecting.
