Christine's love for storytelling began before she could read. As a little girl, she would hunker under the covers with her sister, whispering stories to keep from being afraid of the dark. Once she learned to read, she spent a good portion of her childhood with her nose in a book. Christine's romance with the past began with books by Laura Ingalls Wilder and Louisa May Alcottt - later she discovered Twain, Dickens, Dumas and Sabatini and then on to epic sagas by the likes of Tolkien, Clavell and Michener. It was in these beloved books where she found the pathways to worlds beyond her small neighborhood on the south side of Chicago.Christine eventually left the old neighborhood, completed college, and began a design career. At work she met and fell in love with her fellow designer, Brian Blevins - a truly wonderful guy - and she married him. They had children - four fantastic kids - and eventually the family settled in Elmhurst, Illinois. Christine built a busy life together with Brian, running their graphic design studio, raising their children, and all the while never losing the need to feed a curious mind and become wholeheartedly immersed in a good book.Christine and Brian share a love for travel, and over their years together, they journeyed all around America and to countries abroad. She was on the Isle of Skye, when a story popped into her head. In itself, this was not an unusual event. She would often while time away making up stories while waiting in line at the grocery, nursing a baby, or filling the moments before falling asleep.But something was different on Skye. Breathing in the smells of heather moor, and sheep, and salt-sea, Christine listened to the waves lapping the shore of Loch Dunvegan, took in the twilight panorama and let her mind fly away on an adventure. It was her favorite kind of story, complete with a good dose of danger and a dash of romance. And suddenly in this wild place, she was struck by the wild urge to write it all down. Though she'd never written anything other than essays and papers back in her school days, she purchased the first of many spiral notebooks at the airport, and on the flight back began scribbling her Scottish inspired story in longhand. She found her scribbles necessitated research. The research resulted in more scribbling...Christine wrote the kind of book she loved to read - an adventure story filled with compelling characters and set against a detailed backdrop of vivid history that would transport the reader to another time and place. She learned many things over the two years it took to complete this first novel, the most important being how much she enjoyed researching the details of culture and period, how very much she loved storytelling and writing, and how much more she needed to learn. She tucked her finished manuscript into a box, set it on a shelf, and signed up for a writer's workshop at the community college.Genealogical research gave impetus to her next effort, which became her first published work. The premise for Christine's debut novel, MIDWIFE OF THE BLUE RIDGE was inspired by the discovery of a pair of Daniel Boone-like Blevins ancestors who were hunters and explorers living on the Virginian frontier in the mid 1700's.THE TORY WIDOW and it's companion book THE TURNING OF ANNE MERRICK come from her avid interest in the thrilling, romantic and incredible event known as the American Revolution. Christine crafted a story about the men and women who took up arms to wage an impossible war against the world's mightiest superpower. She is at present finishing the third and final book in the series.Christine continues to draw inspiration from travel and history, and still spends a good amount of time with her nose in a book, scouring up the details that make her stories come alive. Now that her children have grown and gone off on their own, she lives with her husband Brian and their golden-doodle, splitting her time between their home in Elmhurst, and tramping the northern woodlands for fiddlehead ferns, morel mushrooms and flights of fancy at their lake house in Michigan.