H J Bellus

Heidi Hooper taught elementary school in Gooding, Idaho, while quietly publishing romance novels at night as HJ Bellus, a name taken from the grandparents who raised her. In 2016 she threw a party to tell her town who she was; Idaho Education News counted 21 books by then and reported her writing close to ten thousand words a day. At the time she and her husband Tim were raising two children on a family farm near Gooding known for prize hogs. Iron Sinners (2014) opened the Sinners Never Die series, set around a motorcycle club. That Was Yesterday (2018) is the second Yesterday book, Cruz (2018) belongs to the Diablos Throne MMA sequence, and Wrong Side (2022) launched The Bad Boys of Penwood with an enemies-to-lovers college football story.