At thirty-two Kimberly Rossetti, a finance officer at a Lexus car dealership, has had her heart broken more times than she wants to remember. With two failed engagements, a divorce and again alone with no prospects, she hardly seems the type to dream of being a published romance author. Dreading another holiday alone, she signs up for The Mistletoe Retreat, a nine-day writing retreat in Burlington, VT. Deep inside Kimberly knows she's at a junction in her life and it's time to either fulfill her dream or let it go. The other reason she decides to attend the conference is because famed romance writer, H.T. Cowell, once the best selling romance writer in America, and the author whose books instilled in her the desire to be a writer, will be speaking in public for the first time in more than a decade.
In one of her breakout sessions Kimberly meets another aspiring writer, and one of the few men at the conference, Zeke, an intelligent man with a wry wit who seems as interested in Kimberly as he is in the retreat. As Kimberly begins to open up to him about her stories and dreams, she inadvertently reveals her own troubled past. As Zeke helps her to discover why her books fail to live up to their potential she begins to wonder if he's really talking more about her life than her literature. But as she grows closer to him, she realizes that Zeke has his own darkness, a past he's unwilling to talk about.
Richard Paul Evans is an American author best known for writing *The Christmas Box* and, more recently, the Michael Vey series. Evans, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, with his wife Keri, five children, and one grandson.
Evans graduated with a B.A. from the University of Utah in 1984. While working as an advertising executive, he wrote a Christmas story for his children. Unable to find a publisher or an agent, he self-published the work in 1993 as a paperback novella entitled *The Christmas Box* and distributed it to bookstores in his community. The next year *The Christmas Box* hit #2 on the *New York Times* Best Seller list.
Released in hardcover in 1995, *The Christmas Box* (Simon & Schuster) became the first book to simultaneously reach the #1 position on the *New York Times* Best Seller List for both paperback and hardcover editions. That same year, the book was made into a television movie of the same title.
Evans has subsequently written 36 nationally best-selling books, including some for children, with conservative Christian themes and appealing to family values. His 1996 book *Timepiece* was made into a television movie, as were *The Locket* (1998), *A Perfect Day* (2006), *The Mistletoe Promise* (2016), and *The Mistletoe Inn* (2017).
In 1997, Evans founded Christmas Box House International, an organization devoted to building shelters and providing services for abused and neglected children. As of 2017, more than 35,000 children had been served by Christmas Box House facilities.
Source: [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Paul_Evans)
