Author's Message

Christians, Cops and Thieves

FORMER RT INSPIRATIONAL REVIEWER JILL ELIZABETH
NELSON EXPLORES THE ART OF THE STEAL

Every aspiring author has heard the advice, "Read everything in your genre," but few take
it as literally as Jill Elizabeth Nelson did. As the senior inspirational reviewer for RT BOOKreviews from 2003–06, Nelson had the releases of every major Christian publisher
at her command each month, and she took full advantage of that.

"I have eclectic tastes in what I read and what I write," she explains. So reviewing for RT was the perfect gig -- it allowed her to read romantic suspense and historicals, contemporary romance and fantasy, women's fiction and young adult fiction. "It teaches you good craft by example," Nelson says. "Reading a poor book, not that there were many of them, will teach you what not to do. But reading all these wonderful writers will teach you what's good and what grabs a reader."

True to her varied tastes, Nelson's first three manuscripts were all in different genres. "The first one I wrote was a fantasy," she explains. "The second was women's fiction. The third was in a more popular, more widely read genre, and it sold in about
a year." That manuscript hits the shelves this month as Nelson's romantic suspense debut, Reluctant Burglar (Multnomah), and is the first in the three-book To Catch a Thief series, set in the world of stolen art and museum security.

"This book was born because of a dream I had," Nelson elaborates. "I woke up after I had a pretty intense dream about a young woman returning a painting to a home. I knew she was taking the painting back and removing a forgery. I woke up when she was switching the paintings, and my imagination took over from there." Nelson's imagination expanded that dream scene into the story of Desiree Jacobs, whose life is thrown into turmoil when her beloved father is murdered in Europe, leaving her responsible for his museum-security firm -- and for the crate of stolen paintings she discovers he'd secretly swiped from their clients over the years. "If she turns them over to the authorities she'll destroy her business," Nelson says. "Plus, she receives a death threat from the head of the theft ring. Not only is her life on the line, but so are those of her employees. But she knows it's wrong [to keep the artwork]."

Desiree's dilemma puts her Christian faith in conflict with her instinct for self-preservation and sets her at odds with Tony Lucano, the driven FBI agent responsible for tracking down stolen art. Desiree and Tony's relationship will extend throughout the series, and each novel will begin with a "caper": a staged robbery in which Desiree must expose a museum's security flaws to get her firm hired.

Nelson is already traveling to Arizona to dig into stolen Native American artifacts and
the efforts made to track them down for the next book in her series, Reluctant Runaway, due out in May '07. She plans to tackle the "hemorrhage" of cultural artifacts from developing countries in August '07's Reluctant Smuggler. But she hopes her novels will do more than educate readers about art and the FBI. "I want [my books] to be something that anybody could pick up and enjoy," she says. "If all they get is the entertainment, fine. If they get something out of it they can apply to their lives, that would be the ultimate." -- Colleen Cusick