Stella Hardesty August 2009On Sale: August 4, 2009Featuring: Stella Hardesty288 pages ISBN: 0312559208EAN: 9780312559205Hardcover$24.99 Mystery Amateur Sleuth, Mystery Woman Sleuth Buy at Amazon.com A Bad Day For Sorryby Sophie Littlefield Stella Hardesty dispatched her abusive husband with a wrench shortly before her fiftieth birthday. A few years later, she’s so busy delivering home-style justice on her days off, helping other women deal with their own abusive husbands and boyfriends, that she barely has time to run her sewing shop in her rural Missouri hometown. Some men need more convincing than others, but it’s usually nothing a little light bondage or old-fashioned whuppin’ can’t fix. Since Stella works outside of the law, she’s free to do whatever it takes to get the job done—as long as she keeps her distance from the handsome devil of a local sheriff, Goat Jones. When young mother Chrissy Shaw asks Stella for help with her no-good husband, Roy Dean, it looks like an easy case. Until Roy Dean disappears with Chrissy’s two-year-old son, Tucker. Stella quickly learns that Roy Dean was involved with some very scary men, as she tries to sort out who’s hiding information and who’s merely trying to kill her. It’s going…

Sometimes our imaginations cook up the perfect story from scratch. Other times, life hands us the spark of the story and our imaginations use it as a launching pad. Such was the case with my first novella, Bluegrass Easter, released this March in Love Inspired’s Easter Promises. Sure, it’s the final story in my Kentucky Corners series, and it’s special for that, but there’s another reason it captures my heart: the real-life spark of the story. An avid knitter, I’d been getting regular updates from a yarn shop and sheep farm in my area. One email chronicled the story of a particularly…shall we say…romantic male sheep and the surprise population explosion he brought to the ewes at the farm. I ask you, how could a romance novelist–let alone one who knits–pass up a courtship like that? Any writer worth her salt (or in this case her fleece) wouldn’t leave it at just a bunch of surprise sheep pregnancies. I had to find ways for this “bumper crop” of lambs to take librarian Audrey Lupine to her emotional edge. It’s cruel, I know, to take a control freak and send her beyond her coping, but the payoff is so very sweet…