About the Book

Book: An Unexpected Catch

Author: Abbey Downey

Genre: Christian Historical Romance

Release date: November 19, 2024

Can she count on the pitcher to save her dream, or will his secret destroy their futures?

Bea Curran has forged a career as an umpire in Chicago’s semi-professional baseball league, and now she’s ready to move toward her dream of leading the women’s athletic department at Western College. With her reputation on the line, the last thing she needs is a romance with a player known for his womanizing ways. But when her women’s baseball team desperately needs help, she can’t ignore the one man who could save them.

Emmett Worland, a talented new pitcher in the Chicago City League, has been keeping a painful secret that could end his baseball career for good. While he tries to hide his worsening illness, Emmett agrees to help coach Bea’s struggling team in hopes that it will be a step toward redeeming a bad reputation he didn’t earn.

Bea and Emmett’s undeniable attraction deepens the more time they spend together, but with so much at stake, can they afford to let their hearts lead the way? Or will the shadows of the past and the uncertainties of the future destroy their chance at a happily ever after?

Click here to get your copy!

About the Author

Abbey Downey started writing inspirational romance stories during naptime when her kids were babies and found she couldn’t stop. She previously published two books with Love Inspired Historical under the pen name Mollie Campbell. She also works with Spark Flash Fiction producing a quarterly digital magazine that contains love stories under 1000 words.

A life-long Midwestern girl, Abbey lives in central Indiana with her husband, two kids, and one rather enthusiastic beagle. She loves watching her kids play sports and fixing up a 1900 farmhouse with her husband.

More from Abbey

From the first record of it in the late 1700s, the game of baseball grew in popularity—and eccentricity—for decades. There have been plenty of larger-than-life characters and wild tales in the sport, but in my research for An Unexpected Catch, I was most drawn to the stories of those baseball legends many people haven’t heard of.

One of those was the inspiration for the heroine of my story. Amanda Clement became the first female umpire in baseball when she began refereeing games in a semi-professional league—at only sixteen years old! Amanda was a wildly talented athlete in her own right and was known to stand up to the rough men who played baseball in the early twentieth century without hesitation.

Like Amanda, my heroine, Bea Curran, built her career as an umpire in a man’s sport through determination and skill. She knows how to stand up for herself on the field or in other sports, but as she leaves baseball to pursue a different dream, she has to learn how to navigate new pressures to conform to the expectations those in authority place on her.

One of the hardest parts of the research I did for this book was related to the players. Lots of old baseball tales are fun and harmless enough. But then there are too many stories like “Gentleman” George Decker, a Chicago first baseman who was hit in the head by a pitch in 1897. He was denied time off to recover and was hit again not long after. His mental state declined quickly, leading to delusions and threatening behavior. He was institutionalized several times before dying in an asylum in 1909.

Decker was far from the only player to suffer from intense mental and physical health issues after a head injury. Today, we would recognize these players’ symptoms as the result of concussions. But in the early 1900s and before, little was known about brain injuries from blows to the head. These men suffered in silence while being told they were crazy, and many were either arrested or placed in asylums, torn from their loved ones instead of treated.

In An Unexpected Catch, pitcher Emmett Worland feels like baseball is all he has. When he’s forced to face the likely loss of his career thanks to post-concussion syndrome (as we call it now), he has to figure out if anything else could possibly make his life worthwhile if he can’t play. Just like many of us, he wrestles with his purpose when the path he thought he would take is irrevocably disrupted.

Thankfully, there are plenty of wonderful moments in this story to remind the characters (and us) that God blesses us even in struggles. Along with all the fun vintage baseball and historical details, readers will follow Bea and Emmett as they grow in their faith, find their way through changing circumstances, and fall in love with the person they least expected.

Happy reading!

Abbey

Interview with Abbey

How do you create your main characters?

I usually start a story with a few plot elements, a loose setting, etc. Those things give me a rough idea of what kind of person each character needs to be or what they want during the story. This is the stage where I also get a mental picture of what they look like, and I go hunt down a real-life photo to look at when I try to describe them in the story. From those first pieces of information, I start taking notes in a Word document. They’re really messy, with terrible grammar and sentence fragments, but they include things like what drives each character, what got them to where they are at the beginning of the story, their family life, their hopes and dreams. Then I like to use The Emotional Wound Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi to fill out their motivations and how they’ll react to events in the story. In most of my stories, their name is one of the last parts, sometimes even changing a few times in the first chapter until it feels right.

What would you say is the most difficult part of writing a book?

Getting past my self-doubts! Writing a first draft feels to me like making a million tiny choices, whether that’s word choice, how characters act and respond, or what plot elements to include. I’m always doubting if I made the right choices. When you’re the one putting together every word of a book, it’s hard to look past those details and see that hey, this is actually a pretty good story. There’s always something that I’m wondering the whole time if it works or if it will come across to readers the way I intended it to. Those doubts can hold a writer back and bog down the entire process if we let them. So I have to really work to set aside the perfectionism in order to get a book done. Having a great editor helps with this because I know I can trust her to pick up on things that aren’t working.

What does your family think of your writing?

They are just the most supportive. When I started writing, I was so afraid of failing that I wrote under a pen name and didn’t tell anyone except my husband until I got my first contract! Now, my family members are so enthusiastic about it, even the ones I would never expect to read historical romance. And now that my kids are old enough to understand what I do, they’re the best support. They’re always willing to talk about my books with me and listen to the random historical trivia I pick up while researching. And they’ve both claimed to want to be writers one day, which is just about the biggest compliment I can imagine.

How many books have you written? Which is your favorite?

I’ve written eight books, with four currently published and the fifth releasing in 2025. I’ve never had to pick a favorite that I’ve written! I think I would choose An Unexpected Catch. I love baseball but my twelve-year-old son is absolutely obsessed with it. He knows an unbelievable amount of baseball trivia and statistics, so I consulted with him quite a bit while writing this book and we enjoyed learning new historical facts together while I was researching. It’s so special to look at it and know I got to collaborate with him.

Any current or upcoming projects you’d like to tell us about?

I just finished the third book in the Adventurous Hearts series, An Uncharted Dream, which will be released in July 2025. In this book, Leonora Thornton has built her own group of adventurers that’s open to both men and women after being barred from the prestigious Explorer’s Club because of her gender. Spurred to push past her crippling fear by a series of mysterious letters, Leonora and her club join an expedition to Peru, the same place her beloved father died. When God’s path for her becomes unclear, Leonora finds that perhaps falling in love with her best friend was His plan all along.

Blog Stops

Inspired by Fiction, December 2

Book Looks by Lisa, December 2

Debbie’s Dusty Deliberations, December 3

She Lives to Read, December 4

Texas Book-aholic, December 5

Locks, Hooks and Books, December 6

Truth and Grace Homeschool Academy, December 7

Happily Managing a Household of Boys, December 8

Book Reviews From an Avid Reader, December 9

Leslie’s Library Escape, December 10

Stories By Gina, December 11 (Author Interview)

Allyson Jamison, December 11

Connie’s History Classroom, December 12

Cover Lover Book Review, December 13

For Him and My Family, December 14

Holly’s Book Corner, December 15

Pause for Tales, December 15

Giveaway

To celebrate her tour, Abbey is giving away the grand prize of a $50 Amazon gift card!!

Be sure to comment on the blog stops for extra entries into the giveaway! Click the link below to enter.

http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/00adcf54107