Welcome to the Christian Fiction Scavenger Hunt! If you’ve just discovered the hunt, be sure to start at Stop #1, and collect the clues through all the stops, in order, so you can enter to win one of our top 5 grand prizes!

• The hunt BEGINS on 10/15 at noon MST with Stop #1 at Lisa Tawn Bergren’s site.

• Hunt through our loop using Chrome or Firefox as your browser (not Explorer).

• There is NO RUSH to complete the hunt—you have all weekend (until Sunday, 10/18 at midnight MST)! So take your time, reading the unique posts along the way; our hope is that you discover new authors/new books and learn new things about them.

• Submit your entry for the grand prizes by collecting the CLUE on each author’s scavenger hunt post and submitting your answer in the Rafflecopter form at the final stop, back on Lisa’s site. Many authors are offering additional prizes along the way!

If you haven’t dropped by here before, I’m Olivia. My Tree of Life series includes The Inn at Hidden Run, In The Cradle Lies, When I Meet You, and What You Said to Me, releasing November 1. I’ve also written  other contemporary fiction, historical fiction, and Amish fiction. You can find out about all of that by visiting here.  You can also look for me on Facebook.

Here’s what my latest book is about: When 15-year-old Tisha Crowder gets caught shoplifting, attorney Nolan Duffy tries to protect her from consequences that could rattle her already troubled life. His daughter, Jillian, feels like she’s the one being punished instead—by having Tisha assigned to work with her on a backlog of genealogy files. Tisha doesn’t seem interested in taking the job seriously, and Jillian’s patience wears thin. Besides, everyone in Canyon Mines knows the Crowder family has experienced generations of brokenness. Then a sliver of hope turns up in long-ago words in plain sight, challenging shrouded assumptions about Tisha’s family. Now Jillian is the one who can walk with Tisha back to 1893 and uncover where everything went wrong in the first place—and save her from the past.

After writing about the same town for four books, I get some questions about what that’s like. The editor I worked with on four books in my time-slip Tree of Life series visited my city for a conference, and I had the pleasure of hosting her in my home overnight and running around for a day. Good memories!

One of her questions for me was about my process for developing a fictitious town and keeping track of where everything was over the course of a series. I ducked into my office, returned with a roll of wide paper, pushed off the rubber bands, and unfurled my map-in-progress. Without it, I’d be lost in Canyon Mines.

When I started the series, I knew I needed a cozy town, located a reasonable commuting distance from Denver, that encompassed the highlights of what Colorado is most known for—mountains, mining history, skiing, small-town charm, incredible scenery, and tourist traffic. While I did have a historic town in mind that fit the general bill for inspiration, I needed street names, shop names, geographic features, town history, annual traditions—all the things that make a town charming and memorable.

In this fourth book in the series, What You Said to Me, the historical mystery genealogist Jillian Parisi-Duffy must untangle dates back to the early years of Canyon Mines and the mining economy that was the backbone of Colorado’s history. Whenever I drive through the “real life” area where my fictional town is set, Canyon Mines will always feel true to me, and I’ll be looking for the streets and shops I know so well.

Here’s the Stop #14 Basics:

If you’re interested, you can order What You Said to Me on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Christianbook.com or at your local bookstore!

Clue to Write Down: scavenger

Stop #15, the Next Stop on the Loop: Pepper Basham’s site!