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 3/14 at noon MST 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, 3/17 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 this is your first time at my website, hello! I’m Cara Putman, the author of 40 books, wife, mom, Big10 clinical professor in law and ethics, and so much more. I love traveling and exploring new places, and am always looking for my next big book idea. This year I’ve turned in one book with two more to write. You can explore all of them here on my website and buy them wherever books are sold or directly from me here. I also host the podcast Book Talk with Cara Putman where I interview authors about their books and writing.

My next release is The Vanished, which releases April 16th. Continue to the bottom for a bonus giveaway I’m running just for this scavenger hunt. Here’s what the book is about:

Janae Simmons left the small town of Kedgewick, Virginia, ten years ago to pursue her legal career and never looked back–until a professional mistake leads her to her grandmother’s historic carriage house and to the town where her past threatens to find her. The quiet streets echo with her grandfather’s sterling reputation, one that conflicts with fresh questions that claw at Janae, launching her on a reluctant journey to unearth his secrets. When her new job at a local law firm doesn’t live up to expectations, she wonders if coming home was the right decision.

Carter Montgomery starts his art preservation career with the only job he can get–director at the Elliott Museum of Art. At least Kedgewick is a nice enough town to provide him and his nephew with a safe place to grieve the loss of Carter’s sister. But Carter’s calm days disappear when an elderly woman claims two paintings in the museum’s collection were stolen from her family during World War II. Carter enlists Janae’s help to unravel the legal labyrinth of art ownership, and the peaceful facade of Kedgewick morphs into a hot bed of secrets.

When an attorney turns up dead and Janae uncovers another painting, what began as a simple legal issue spirals into a race against time. As the web of intrigue tightens, the duo must confront a looming question: What dark truths lie beneath the surface, waiting to be exposed?

Why art? Especially for someone who didn’t use to find art museums all that interesting?

When I started writing The Vanished, I had a vague idea — it was supposed to be book two in the series, but had to get bumped up. It’s a little terrifying to look back now and realize I had Janae and the series idea. I also had researched and written the novella for We Three Kings, which meant I had immersed myself in research related to art, the Monuments Men, World War II, and the days immediately after war. Along the way I collected an assortment of research books that had my mind spinning with ideas. With art on my mind and knowing that the big what if needed to relate to the law, I’ve wanted to play with an art provenance issue since writing Shadowed by Grace. There are so many on-going legal issues related to art ownership after the wide-spread art theft that occurred during World War II.

Because the art markets are largely unregulated it’s also an area ripe for abuse, which became the foundation for Charlotte’s story in the prequel to this novel. Art sales are often used by organized crime for money laundering purposes, which is utterly fascinating in its own way. Then add in the complicated nature of art hoaxes, forgeries, and so much more and I had so much material. I went from not having more than a few sentences of an idea to a mind that was a carousel of what ifs and possibilities.

I made charts and spiderwebs as I tried to track what could happen. I read cases and researched to see what the legal arguments might be related to provenance, art ownership, and more. I tried to figure out how to compress a legal case that could linger in the courts for years into a sequence of events that might take two months in this novel. All with an eye and commitment to keeping it very realistic and true to procedure and facts while at the same time recognizing that this book is a work of fiction. It’s part of what made The Vanished such fun to write.

Just in time for the launch of The Vanished , I’m rereleasing The Art of Deception. This novel was in the Come What May collection that released in August. It’s also the prequel to The Vanished. If you missed it in Come What May, you can get it in ebook for $2.99 from my store. After The Vanished releases in April, I’ll release it to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the other sites. But for now, you can buy it for $2.99 direct from me here from my store. You will be able to get it in a format that you like to read your ebooks in. Just go here. While you’re there feel free to shop around.

Here’s the Stop #2 Basics:

If you’re interested, you can preorder The Vanished on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Christianbook.com, Baker Bookhouse, or at your local bookstore (Indie bookstore.com)!

Clue to Write Down: people

Link to Stop #3, the Next Stop on the Loop: Kimberley Woodhouse’s site!

To celebrate the scavenger hunt and the coming release of The Vanished, I’m giving away a copy of the book, the notebook, and the movie Woman in Gold.
a Rafflecopter giveaway