Sarah Beth Hopton came by her love of crime writing honestly: her father was a detective for the sheriff’s office and a graduate of Quantico’s FBI Academy who shared with her his admiration of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes at an early age. She grew up visiting her father after school at the county jail and passed the time between homework and dinner pouring over his old, unsolved case files or eating a candy bar with Old Smokey, the beloved district attorney who liked to tell tall tales about the rural county’s many criminal shenanigans. Hopton holds degrees in journalism, creative writing, and rhetoric and is an assistant professor at Appalachian State University. When she’s not in the archives skulking after the next case, she’s working her 3.5-acre organic homestead with her partner, their two dogs, pigs, chickens, rabbits, too many ducks, and a rascally fainting goat named after her dad, Bob.