Sara Beth Hopton, Author

Sarah Beth Hopton has always written. In fact, she wrote before she could write by dictating stories she made up to her next door neighbors. When Hopton learned to write and later type, her favorite toy was a Remington typewriter. “I loved the way the glossy black keys felt under my fingers,” she says. She wrote her first murder mystery at 16 years old, and had her first piece of writing published in the Tampa Tribune when she was 18.

“I like to eat as much as I like to write,” jests Hopton, “So in college, I majored in journalism (because the journalists I knew ate at slightly better restaurants than did the English adjunct professors), but I never felt comfortable telling someone's story in six column inches or less.” But during a trip to Africa, Hopton read Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Pope Brock's Indiana Gothic, and knew immediately she’d found her genre: literary nonfiction, which borrows elements of journalism, fiction, and classic essay.

A blurb about Hopton’s forthcoming murder mystery: On a cold October night 1890, a 24-year old woman savagely murdered her lover's wife and child, and then stuffed their bodies into a baby's perambulator and wheeled them through the streets of London. The trial that followed became a sensation and helped reinvigorate a movement to abolish capital punishment. Woman at the Devil's Door chronicles the life, loves, crimes, and execution of Mary Eleanor Wheeler, British murderess.

To learn more about the book, visit: sarahbethhopton.com or become a fan of Woman at the Devil's Door on Facebook.