March 14 – 20: “Must religion always be a clash?”

This week ITW Members Heather B. Moore, Libby Hellmann, Susan Froetschel, J. H. Bográn, Jean Heller and Jerry Amernic discuss religion and thrillers. Must religion, as described in thrillers, always be a clash?

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Most of Jean Heller’s career was as an investigative and projects reporter and editor in New York City, Washington, D.C. and St. Petersburg Florida. Her career as a novelist began in the 1990s with the publication of the thrillers, Maximum Impact and Handyman by St. Martin’s Press. Then life intervened and postponed her new book, The Someday File, to publication in late 2014. Jean has won the Worth Bingham Prize, the Polk Award, and is an eight-time Pulitzer Prize nominee.

Heather B. Moore is a USA Today bestselling author of more than a dozen historical novels and thrillers, written under pen name H.B. Moore. She writes women’s fiction, romance and inspirational non-fiction under Heather B. Moore. This can all be confusing, so her kids just call her Mom. Heather attended Cairo American College in Egypt, the Anglican School of Jerusalem in Israel, and earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Brigham Young University in Utah.

J. H. Bográn, born and raised in Honduras, is the son of a journalist. He ironically prefers to write fiction rather than fact. José’s genre of choice is thrillers, but he likes to throw in a twist of romance into the mix. His works include novels and short stories in both English and Spanish. His debut novel TREASURE HUNT, which The Celebrity Café hails as an intriguing novel that provides interesting insight of architecture and the life of a fictional thief, has also been selected as the Top Ten in Preditors & Editor’s Reader Poll. FIREFALL, his second novel, was released in 2013 by Rebel ePublishers. Coffee Time Romance calls it “a taut, compelling mystery with a complex, well-drawn main character.” He’s a member of the Short Fiction Writers Guild, Crime Writer’s Association, and the International Thriller Writers. He lives in Honduras with his family and one “Lucky” dog.

Libby Fischer Hellmann left a career in broadcast news in Washington, DC and moved to Chicago 35 years ago, where she, naturally, began to write gritty crime fiction. Twelve novels and twenty short stories later, she claims they’ll take her out of the Windy City feet first. She has been nominated for many awards in the mystery and crime writing community and has even won a few. Her short stories have been published in a dozen anthologies, the Saturday Evening Post, and Ed Gorman’s “25 Criminally Good Short Stories” collection.

Susan Froetschel is the author of five novels. Fear of Beauty and Allure of Deceit are set in Afghanistan. Fear of Beauty was a 2014 Mary Higgins Clark Award nominee and recipient of the 2014 Youth Literature Award by the Middle East Outreach Council and the 2014 top mystery award by Military Writers Society of America. Froetschel is managing editor of YaleGlobal Online, a public-service magazine that covers globalization defined as the interconnectedness of our world. She lives in Michigan.

Jerry Amernic is a Toronto author. He’s been a newspaper reporter, columnist, magazine writer, and teacher of journalism. His first novel Gift of the Bambino was praised by the likes of The Wall Street Journal. Jerry now writes high-paced, historical fiction. The Last Witness is about the last living survivor of the Holocaust in 2039, while his biblical-historical thriller QUMRAN is about an archaeologist who makes a dramatic discovery in the Holy Land.