[Glory, North Carolina 01] • Glory Be!

Ron and Janet Benrey are a husband-and-wife team who write romantic-suspense novels for Steeple Hill Love Inspired Suspense. Their writing journey took them along significantly different paths before they cowrote their first novel in the late 1990s.

Ron Benrey has been a writer "forever." He wrote his way through engineering school working as a freelance writer and editor for magazines such as Electronics Illustrated and Popular Science Monthly. He eventually moved on to writing speeches, annual reports and the occasional advertisement--all for high-tech corporations. Along the way, he wrote seven nonfiction books about electronics and technology. He jokes that his specialty is writing interesting words about dull subjects.

Janet Benrey is a late-blooming writer. Earlier in her career she performed a variety of unusual jobs, including executive recruiter ("headhunter") and wedding photographer. She began writing with Ron in 1989, soon after she earned a degree in communications and they launched Benrey+Benrey, a marketing communications firm.

Ron and Janet's daytime collaboration to create marketing materials for large corporations soon became an after-hours partnership to write cozy romantic mysteries with strong Christian themes. "We started to think about an interesting story and one thing led to another," Janet says. "We're both avid readers, and we decided to write the kind of suspense novels we enjoy."

Although both Ron and Janet were published nonfiction writers, it took them more than seven years to master the specific techniques of fiction writing. "At one low point," Ron says, "we threw away everything we'd written and began again."

Their perseverance paid off with a contract for their first novel, Little White Lies , for a major Christian publisher. "Our Cozy Mystery series for Steeple Hill Love Inspired Suspense began with our sixth novel, Glory Be! " Janet explains. "We followed up with three more." Ron adds, "We enjoy writing about Glory so much that we moved from Maryland to a small city in North Carolina that has a lot in common with fictional Glory."