Hallmark fan-favorite Bethany Joy Lenz is having quite the 2026. Not only was her new Hallmark+ series, “Hope Valley: 1874,” a huge hit, but the actress managed to spend every spare moment she got on the set to finish her debut novel.
Simon & Schuster will release Lenz’s period thriller, titled “The Betrayal of Cora Wexford,” nationwide on October 20. What’s it about and where did she write it? Here’s the scoop…
Bethany Joy Lenz Explains How Her 1st Novel is Different Than Her Best-Selling Memoir
“The Betrayal of Cora Wexford” is Lenz’s second book in two years, but it’s very different than her New York Times best-selling memoir, “Dinner For Vampire.” That book was a vulnerable and honest dive into the decade she personally spent stuck in a cult, even as she filmed the teen drama “One Tree Hill.”
While that was a harrowing personal account of challenges she overcame, Lenz has taken the wisdom she’s gained about psychological warfare in the years since to inform her story about an artist named Cora Wexford who lives in 1888, single and childless at 37. Simon & Schuster describes the book as a “gripping novel of psychological suspense that examines intertwined themes of desire, manipulation and community complicity—and shows how truly terrifying love can be.”
In the book, readers will discover the secrets that drove Cora to “flee life in America and come to London,” per the publisher. On her birthday, she meets a “charming and successful stranger” named Miles Vale and is presented with a chance to “catapult her career.” As she paints recently deceased women — a Victorian practice in the 1880s — she begins to realize that the women she’s been commissioned to paint after their deaths were all murdered in the same way. She becomes obsessed with the cases and as she does, “her life begins unraveling.”
“This is historical fiction, and it’s different than a memoir,” Lenz told KTLA earlier this year. “For the memoir, I knew the story because it was my life, and I had the chronology all written out. It’s quite easy to fly through it.”
“With this one, I’m really crafting a new story from scratch,” Lenz explained. “So this one is a psychological thriller set in London in the 1880s. It’s set in the art world. There’s a woman who’s a painter — she paints postmortem portraiture — and she gets involved in researching the lives of the victims of who we now call Jack the Ripper.”
How Bethany Joy Lenz Worked on Her Novel While Filming ‘Hope Valley: 1874’
Incredibly, Lenz wrote some of “The Betrayal of Cora Wexford” while filming “Hope Valley: 1874,” a prequel to “When Calls The Heart” co-starring Benjamin Ayres and Jill Hennessy. Lenz would write whenever she had a spare moment on set as they filmed in Vancouver this past winter, she revealed during a “Talk Shop Live” discussion on September 22.
“If we had a camera turnaround and there was a specific scene, I would just work on (the book) in my head all day,” she recalled. “I was just thinking about it in the moments that I didn’t have to focus on my character on ‘1874.’”
“So I was doing (the show), and then in between camera setups, I would go and sit on a bale of hay or wherever it was,” she continued, “because it’s a period piece. And I would, you know, get comfortable in my corset and sit down and just type.”
“I mean, at least the corset helped because it’s all the 1800s,” she laughed.
“The Betrayal of Cora Wexford” is available wherever books are sold, and Lenz is on a multi-city book tour. Soon, she’ll return to Vancouver film season two of “Hope Valley: 1874.”
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Bethany Joy Lenz’s First Novel is Here & We Can’t Believe Where She Was When She Wrote It