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 4/10 at noon Mountain with Stop #1 at LisaTawnBergren.com.
• 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, 4/13 at midnight Mountain)! 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!

Hi! My name’s Cara Putman and I’m so glad you’re here! I’m a writer of legal romantic suspense and WWII fiction. I also teach law and ethics at a Big Ten university where I live with my husband and four kids. You can learn more about me and all my books here on my site and on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.  But I always adore a good twisty story. My newest release is a legal romantic suspense—The Accused. Here’s what it’s about:

When a popular college student is murdered, her international roommate, Anneliese, becomes a prime suspect. But law professor Margeaux Robbins doesn’t believe that the quiet, lonely German girl in her class is the killer.

Chase Crandall is a burned-out defense attorney ready to extricate himself from the grind of criminal law. After he loses a client to tragedy, he’s ready for an in-house corporate position.

When Chase is assigned to Anneliese’s case, Margeaux is horrified. She doesn’t want him to provide legal counsel—not after what happened to his past client. And not with the evidence incriminating Anneliese. Despite their mutual misgivings, the lawyer and professor pair up to find the killer and prove Anneliese’s innocence. Will they be able to untangle the mystery—and navigate their growing interest in one another—before the wrong person is charged with murder?

Finding Inspiration: The Accused

It was January 2020 when the idea for The Accused began bouncing around my mind. I was sitting in Philadelphia eating dinner with my then-editor Jocelyn Bailey, writing friend Tricia Goyer, and marketing guru Keri Potts as we were chatting about bookish things at dinner during the American Library Association midwinter meeting. One of the topics was what my next proposal/series could be. I was in the middle of writing books for Thomas Nelson, and out promoting Flight Risk, still one of my favorite books for Thomas Nelson, and this was weeks before the world shut down. We were dreaming about some of my study abroad trips and the way readers asked if I would ever write books set in Italy where I had taken students four summers in a row. Jocelyn asked if I’d considered writing something around the Amanda Knox trials. That became the first ‘what if’ that twisted into the strands of The Accused.

It didn’t make sense to me to try to recreate Amanda’s story in this novel. There are so many layers and twists and turns — and it’s Amanda’s story. Intensely personal. In fact, she has a new book, Free: My Search for Meaning that just released, if you’re interested in more about her story. But Amanda’s journey did become part of the inspiration for Anneliese and her experience.

For the romance, though, I pulled on the enemies-to-lovers vibe in A Few Good Men. I have always loved this movie, and it just fit for what I imagined as the push and pull between Margeaux and Chase. Add in layers like the campus murder of Yeardley Love at UVA, and I kept finding more and more inspiration. None of them is the story, but they are all thoughts, ideas, and wonderings. That’s how most of my books come together. An idea here. A headline there. A twist, a turn, and a transition.

Pull it all together, and you get a story that I hope pulls you in, engages your heart, and entertains your mind. Early reviews on Goodreads suggest that is exactly what is happening with this book that is my most like a John Grisham or Lisa Scottoline. Since I have my author copies in the house — Woot! — I am offering a special giveaway that is separate from the larger one in the scavenger hunt. All you have to do is use the form below to be entered for the giveaway for a copy of The Accused and some bookish fun!

Here are the Stop #26 Basics:

If you’re interested, you can order The Accused on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, ChristianBook or at your local bookstore! 

Clue to Write Down: they can 

Link to Stop #27, the Next Stop on the Loop: Jennifer Deibel’s site! (And as a fun bonus, here’s a link to one of the Book Talk podcast episodes when Jennifer was my guest… )