This week Marta Perry and Dorothy Love

Due to limited Internet assess, I will announce the winner of last week drawings next week on Monday, July 4, 2011.

This week I’m hosting Marta Perry Vanish in Plain Sight with and Dorothy Love with Beyond All Measure. If you want to enter the drawings, please leave a comment on one of the post during the week with your email address. I will not enter you without an email address (my way to contact you if you win). If you don’t want to leave an email address, another way you can enter is to email me at margaretdaley@gmail.com. The drawings end Sunday (July 3rd) evening.

Bio for Marta Perry:

I realized I wanted to be a writer at age eight, when I read my first Nancy Drew novel, The Secret of the Old Clock. Most little girl reach the end of that book wanting to be Nancy. I wanted to be the person who created the story!

The dream lay hidden for years while I became a teacher, married, had children…all the usual things. But eventually it re-surfaced, and I began to write, beginning with short children’s stories for Sunday school take-home papers. It seemed a long time until that first acceptance, but eventually I began to sell. After some three hundred published short stories, I finally found the courage to work on the novel I’d always wanted to write.

Thirty-some published novels later, I still feel the same excitement every time I begin a new book–a mix of not believing I can do it combined with an overwhelming urge to see the story on the page.

A lifetime spent in rural Pennsylvania and my own Pennsylvania Dutch roots eventually led me to the books I’m writing now about the Amish. The Pleasant Valley Amish series from Berkley Books are longer, more complex emotional stories with Amish main characters, while my forthcoming HQN suspense novels are more adventure-filled books set in Pennsylvania Dutch country. I’m also writing a Love Inspired series, The Bodine Family, set on the South Carolina coast where we have a second home.

When I’m not writing, I’m busy with church activities, traveling, and spending time with my three children and six beautiful grandchildren.

Blurb for Vanish in Plain Sight:

Since she was a little girl, Marisa Angelo has been haunted by the image of her mother walking away, suitcase in hand, to return to her Amish roots. But now Marisa her mother’s bloodstained suitcase has been found inside the wall of a Pennsylvania farmhouse.

No one—not the police or Marisa’s tight-lipped Amish relatives—can explain. Only Link Morgan, who found the suitcase, is as determined as she to find the truth.

The secret lies somewhere in the quaint Amish settlement. But someone will do anything to ensure the truth remains hidden forever.

Bio for Dorothy Love:

An accomplished author in the secular market, Dorothy Love makes her Christian fiction debut with Beyond All Measure, (Thomas Nelson Fiction) the first book in the Hickory Ridge series. A native Tennessean and an avid amateur historian, she sets her historical novels in the south she knows and loves.  Beauty For Ashes, the second Hickory Ridge novel, will be published early next year.  Dorothy makes her home in the Texas hill country with her husband and their two golden retrievers. Visit her online at Dorothylovebooks.com.

Blurb for Beyond All Measure:

Ada Wentworth, a young Bostonian, journeys to Hickory Ridge, Tennessee, in the years following the Civil War. Alone and nearly penniless following a broken engagement, Ada accepts a position as a lady’s companion to the elderly Lillian Willis, a pillar of the community and aunt to the local lumber mill owner, Wyatt Caldwell. Ada intends to use her millinery skills to establish a hat shop and secure her future.

Haunted by unanswered questions from her life in Boston, Ada is most drawn to two townsfolks: Wyatt, a Texan with big plans of his own, and Sophie, a mulatto girl who resides at the Hickory Ridge orphanage. Ada’s friendship with Sophia attracts the attention of a group of locals seeking to displace the residents of Two Creeks, a “colored” settlement on the edge of town. As tensions rise, Ada is threatened but refuses to abandon her plan to help the girl.

When Lillian dies, Ada is left without employment or a place to call home. And since Wyatt’s primary purpose for staying in Hickory Ridge was to watch over his aunt, he can now pursue his dream of owning Longhorns in his home state of Texas.

With their feelings for each other growing, Ada must decide whether she can trust God with her future and Wyatt with her heart.