Amanda McKinney

Berry Springs does not exist. It is the invented Arkansas town where Amanda McKinney set the long run of small-town romantic suspense novels that opened her career, starting with The Woods. Trail of Deception belongs to a later and tauter sequence, On the Edge, published by Montlake in 2023: a search and rescue tracker named Beckett Stolle goes into Texas swampland after a missing autistic girl and finds her alive beside a body. The Raven's Wife launched the Mad Women books that same year, which McKinney publishes herself and keeps deliberately short, roughly half the length of a standard novel. She writes from Arkansas and has dozens of titles across romance, mystery and thriller.