Deborah Heal

Deborah Heal's latest novel Keeping Faith, a contemporary Christian romance, is the conclusion to the Love Blooms at Bethel series. She is also the author of the Time and Again history mystery trilogy and the follow-up Rewinding Time Series: inspirational novels of history, mystery & romance. Her characters get to visit the past to see the bits that didn’t make it into the history books—something Deborah has always dreamed of doing herself. A former high school English teacher, she firmly believes the maxim “write what you know,” which is why all of her novels are set in her beloved rural southern Illinois. Even so, their historical topics and spiritual themes transcend geographical boundaries. Although she grew up just down the road from the settings of Time and Again and Unclaimed Legacy, she was born not far from the Old Slave House featured in her novel Every Hill and Mountain. Her novel Only One Way Home deals with the Cherokee Trail of Tears, which passed through nearby Golgonda, Illinois. (Unlike the characters in it that novel, Deborah’s great, great grandmother’s Cherokee family remained safely in North Carolina.) Having grown up hearing tales of the Ohio River pirates at Cave in Rock, Deborah wrote about them in How Sweet the Sound. And as a fan of Charles Dickens, she told about his visit to southern Illinois in A Matter of Time. Today Deborah, an avid gardener and bird and butterfly enthusiast, lives with her husband Bob in Monroe County, Illinois, not far from where the pioneers of her novel Once Again struggled to survive amidst Indian attacks. Her hometown Waterloo is the inspiration for the fictional town of Coldwater, which is featured in the Love Blooms at Bethel Series.