NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, October 31, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Arizona author Inger E. Johnson has written two novels rooted in the country she left as a teenager and never stopped writing about. Veiled Halos: A Saga of Betrayal and Redemption is available now on Amazon in ebook and print, in Spanish as Halos Velados, and newly in audiobook. The Muzo Emerald Murders is available for ebook preorder and launches November 4.
The two books could not be more different in tone. One is a multigenerational family saga that moves from Holy Week processions in Popayán to a courtroom in Cali and finally to a wheat field in Idaho. The other is a murder mystery built around stolen emeralds, an impostor in a friar’s habit, and a Chief Inspector who reads rooms the way other men read newspapers. What they share is a setting the author knows in her bones, and a refusal to treat Colombia as scenery.
A Family Saga About What Gets Inherited
Veiled Halos opens in 1923, when a fourth child is born to the Rendón family as drums move through the streets outside. His mother is certain God has chosen this one. His father is quietly counting what he can afford to give.
What follows spans seventy years. Three brothers build their lives out of what the century allows them: faith, ambition, illness, silence, and a love that the family’s architecture cannot accommodate. One gives himself to music. One crosses an ocean and learns to live with the distance. One spends a lifetime perfecting a surface so immaculate that nobody sees the man underneath.
By the time their mother’s will is read aloud in a lawyer’s office that smells of lemon polish and old paper, the reckoning is not beginning. It has simply, at last, been acknowledged.
The novel draws on the historical and cultural landscape of Colombia, including real places, institutions, and periods, but the story and all of its characters are entirely fictional. It is a book about inheritance in every sense: land, faith, grievance, memory, and the stories families tell in order to survive the ones they cannot tell anyone else.
A Mystery Born on Family Vacations
The Muzo Emerald Murders has a lighter step and a darker heart. Ten flawless Muzo emeralds vanish from a vault beneath Bogotá. A senator is found face down in a thermal pool at a hotel inauguration. A Dominican priest arrives from New York to save a crumbling convent in the Candelaria Desert, and a small, bent nun with fifty years of practice starts to suspect that nothing about him is what it claims to be.
Chief Inspector Ciro Rendón works the case from the marble lobby of a newly opened spa hotel in Boyacá to the mercury-lit streets of the capital’s red light district, where children are counted as inventory and paperwork can make the stolen look surrendered.
The book grew out of the author’s childhood. Its dedication makes the origin plain: her mother invented mysteries on family trips to keep the children engaged, turning unfamiliar places into living puzzles. Through those stories the children absorbed history, art, politics, and the character of a country long before they realized they were learning anything at all.
About the Author
Inger E. Johnson was born and raised in Cali, Colombia, and immigrated to the United States at fifteen following political unrest and a direct threat to her father’s safety.
She built her career in banking and later founded a personal financial planning business. She holds advanced degrees in international management, business administration, and translation, and has lived and worked both in the United States and abroad, including several years in Uruguay. She now lives in Arizona, where she serves on her local school district governing board.
Her professional life shows up in her fiction more than readers might expect. Veiled Halos is unusually clear-eyed about ledgers, estates, guardianship law, and the quiet ways institutional power can shape individual lives. That same attention extends to the human cost that can sit underneath public virtue, and Johnson writes about it without flinching.
A third novel, The Road That Knows No End, is expected in spring 2027.
Veiled Halos is available now on Amazon in ebook and print, with the Spanish edition published as Halos Velados: Traición y Redención. An audiobook edition has just been released on Audible and will be available through Amazon shortly. The Muzo Emerald Murders is available for ebook preorder now and releases November 4, with a print edition to follow.
Colombia gave Johnson the stories. Leaving gave her the distance to tell them. Two countries, two very different books, one storyteller.
Where to Buy
Veiled Halos (English, available now): https://www.amazon.com/Veiled-Halos-Saga-Betrayal-Redemption/dp/B0H913NZD4
Halos Velados (Spanish, available now): https://www.amazon.com/Halos-Velados-Traici%C3%B3n-Redenci%C3%B3n-Spanish-ebook/dp/B0H4SRH719
The Muzo Emerald Murders (ebook preorder, releases November 4): https://www.amazon.com/Muzo-Emerald-Murders-Inger-Johnson-ebook/dp/B0H92DQX8C
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