Susan Spencer-Smith

Appalachian author Susan Spencer-Smith draws on her experience as pastor and journalist to write fiction and nonfiction. Susan wrote and edited at the Weirton Daily Times and Wheeling News-Register in her native West Virginia and at daily newspapers in Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Dayton. She answered God’s call to pulpit ministry at age 40, earned a master of divinity degree at United Theological Seminary, Dayton, and served 16 years as a United Methodist pastor. She lives and writes in Weirton, West Virginia, with help from her husband, Grant Beamer, and Thud the Cat.

Susan’s inspirational cozy mysteries come to life in Biddlebourne, the literary double of Middlebourne, West Virginia. Middlebourne is pure Hoopie. What’s Hoopie? Hoopie is a special place along the Upper Ohio River Valley claimed by feisty Scots-Irish settlers. And it’s a special people marked by hard work, firm opinions and staunch loyalties.

The author, who was born in Sistersville, West Virginia, and whose forebears lived and worked in Middlebourne and surrounding Tyler County, invites readers to pull up a chair to a corner of Appalachia where corn grows tall in the bottoms, muskies run thick in the creek, and locals do things their own way

Susan is the author of the Glory Girls Mysteries series