New from USA TODAY Best-selling author Cristine Pope

If you're a fan of Christine Pope's "Witches of Cleopatra Hill" series (and who isn't?), you'll want to snap up her new novella, The Arrangement. Set in 19th century Flagstaff, it continues to fill in the backstory of the Wilcox witch clan. It's filled with great period detail and the plot is achingly romantic.

Interview with Christine Pope

Best-selling author Christine Pope has new book out in her paranormal romance series "The Sedona Files."  I thought this would be a good time to ask her a few questions.

Falling Angels is the next-to-last book (oh no!) in your “Sedona Files” series. When you wrote the first, Bad Vibrations, did you know you were going to chronicle the second generation of your characters?

Frankly, I didn’t even know it was going to be a series. Back then, I really didn’t know what I was doing, and thought writing standalone books was the way to go (hint: it isn’t, at least in the vast majority of cases). But then I began to think how about how I could expand that one book into a series, and started working out the bigger-picture arc of the alien conspiracy/invasion that’s always going on in the background (and sometimes the foreground) of the books. As for the second generation, after I was done writing Angel Fire, I realized I really wanted to tell Grace’s story once she was an adult, and it sort of fell into place that I’d create a second trilogy that takes place approximately twenty-five years after the end of Angel Fire. So that’s why I wrote books for the daughters of the heroines of the first trilogy: Grace (Kara from Desert Hearts’ daughter), Callista (Kirsten from Falling Angels’ daughter), and Taryn, the daughter of Persephone from Bad Vibrations. 

Check out the trailer for The Sedona Files:

You’ve got several established series out there—the Witches of Cleopatra Hill, the Latter Kingdom books, the Gaian Consortium stories—but it seems like you’re always coming up with something new for your readers. What’s next?

The Gaian series has been ended (although there’s a prequel short story coming out in an anthology in February 2016), and I’ll be wrapping up the Sedona Files and the Latter Kingdoms books this year as well. I do plan to write more Witches of Cleopatra Hill books, and more books in my Djinn Wars series. There are also plans in the works for a post-apocalyptic zombie trilogy to launch in late 2016. That one will still be romance, just darker and grittier than some of my other books (and no, the romance is NOT with the zombies). After that…I’ll have to see. I have concepts for several new paranormal romance series (and possibly another science fiction romance series), but none of those would launch until 2017 sometime.

In your PNR, you’ve had witches, ghosts, demons, and now zombies. Have you ever been tempted to write a vampire or werewolf story? 

Well…in a word, no. I know they’re popular, but I like writing about paranormal characters that haven’t been used as much. That said, the newest Latter Kingdoms book (which I’m writing at the moment) does actually include a version of one of those paranormal characters, but I don’t want to say much more about it than that. 

Darknight, Book 2 of the Witches of Cleopatra Hill by Christine Pope

Christine Pope’s new novel Darknight (the second in her Witches of Cleopatra Hill trilogy) takes up one page after Darkangel left off. Angela McAllister, newly minted prima of the McAllister witch clan is in the hands of a rival clan, and the only thing she knows for certain is that the consort she’s bonded with is the brother of her clan’s fiercest enemy.

It’s complicated.

For Angela, biology is destiny and she and Connor Wilcox are fated to be together despite decades of enmity between the McAllisters and the Wilcoxes, a feud that has affected every witch clan in Arizona. Connor is equally eager to let bygones be bygones, and as the yule season approaches, the bond between him and Angela deepens. But that doesn’t mean that their respective families are happy about it or ready to play Secret Santa with each other.

The plot thickens in this book and the danger and tension is ratcheted up several notches as a dire plot unfolds that could destroy the consort connection.  It’s not just witches that live in Cleopatra Hill and in this book we meet some shape-shifters and witches too. 

As always with Pope’s novels, the setting is just as important as the characters and if a reader ever visits Jerome, they could do worse than take the Darknight tour of local eateries (and wineries). With an engaging cast (both normal and paranormal), Darknight is a satisfying read and will whet your appetite for the concluding book in the trilogy. (And speaking of whetting your appetite, I defy you to read some of the chapters without your mouth watering from Pope’s vivid description.)

Pope has a number of giveaways scheduled for the book's launch. Here's a link to the contest running on GoodReads.

Between the Letters--Christine Pope's DarkAngel Book Tour

I discovered I'd gotten ahead of myself in posting letter-themed posts, so today I'm going to do a little D-love.  Prizes are Amazon gift cards--which are always the right size and the right color. Get the details of the giveaway here along with paper and ebook copies of DarkAngel, the first in Pope's new series about "the witches of Cleopatra Hill."

Here's the blurb:

As the future prima, or head witch of her clan, Angela McAllister is expected to bond with her consort during her twenty-first year, thus ensuring that she will come into her full powers at the appointed time. The clock is ticking down, and her consort has yet to make an appearance. Instead, her dreams are haunted by a man she’s never seen, the one she believes must be her intended match.

But with time running out, and dark forces attempting to seize her powers for their own, Angela is faced with a terrible choice: give up her dreams of the man she may never meet and take the safer path, or risk leaving her clan and everyone in it at the mercy of those who seek their ruin.

the giveaway ends tomorrow night so be sure to stop by.