Karen Hagersten writes, edits and translates freelance for customers in Sweden and the United States. Home is a college town, suburbia a morbid fascination. Karen writes historical novels. Bound in Scarlet Thread is about an orphaned girl and a powerful abbess meeting their conjoined past just as northern French barons invade Languedoc to rid it of the Cathar faith. In Rent-a-Husband, three women in Silicon Valley start a well-needed business. A third novel in progress, The Setaside, tells how a desperate landowner fights for his land as the National Trust is founded in Victorian England in 1895.