April's Affections and Intrigues: Love and Mystery Bloom
Karen Ann Hopkins
Karen Ann Hopkins resides in northern Kentucky with her family on a farm that boasts a menagerie of horses, goats, peacocks, chickens, ducks, rabbits, dogs, and cats. Karen's main job is home schooling the kids, but she finds time to give riding lessons, coach a youth equestrian drill team, and of course, write. She was inspired to create her first book, Temptation, by the Amish community she lived in. The experiential knowledge she gained through her interactions with her neighbors drove the story of the star-crossed lovers, Rose and Noah. Their story continues in Belonging, where their families and cultures threaten to tear them apart, and with Forever and Deception, where we find out once and for all if love is enough for them.
Lamb to the Slaughter, the first book in Serenity's Plain Secrets, is Karen's newest Amish endeavor, opening up the darker, grittier, and more secretive lives of Amish society. It's a story about the intertwining lives of three unlikely people in an Indiana Amish Community and the devastating results when a rebellious teenage girl is found shot to death in a corn field during the harvest. Serenity Adams is the newly elected young sheriff in the rural town of Blood Rock, and besides dealing with the threatening behavior of her predecessor, she now has a dead Amish girl on her plate. At first glance, the case seems obvious. The poor girl was probably accidently shot during hunting season, but when the elders of the Amish community, and even the girl's parents, react with uncaring subdued behavior, Serenity becomes suspicious. As she delves deeper into the secretive community that she grew up beside, she discovers a gruesome crime from the past that may very well be related to the Amish girl's shooting. Serenity enlists the help of the handsome bad-boy building contractor, Daniel Bachman. He left the Amish when he was nineteen and has his own dark reasons to help the spunky sheriff solve the crime that the family and friends who shunned him are trying desperately to cover up. Serenity's persistence leads her to a stunning discovery that not only threatens to destroy her blossoming romance with Daniel, but may even take her life in the end.
Karen's YA paranormal/urban fantasy series, the Wings of War, is an epic story about Ember, whose normal life ends abruptly when her parents are killed and she discovers she's a descendent of angels. Still coping with her strange powers, Ember finds herself -- and her heart -- in the middle of a centuries-old war in this "compulsively readable" novel (Kirkus Reviews).
Karen grew up about a mile from Lake Ontario in Upstate New York. She was bitten by the horse bug at the age of five, and after diligently taking riding lessons for several years, was rewarded with her first horse at the age of eleven. The feisty horse's name was Lady, a Quarter Horse-Thoroughbred cross, who became Karen's steadfast companion. Through the years, the constant force in her life was horses. Eventually, she found her place as a riding instructor herself. Before accepting her fate in the barnyard, she worked a short stint as a paralegal, traveled abroad, and guided tourists on horseback riding tours in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee.
Karen is currently working on her bestselling Amish mystery series, Serenity's Plain Secrets, along with a new crime fiction series and a psychological thriller. Karen is also excited to announce there will be more books in the Temptation series and that she's partnered with HarperCollins/One More Chapter for a steamy new Amish themed adult romance.
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