Her biological mother is dying of cancer so it’s sort of this race against time. “It’s this identity crisis where she doesn’t really belong to either, so that’s where we pick up. She didn’t have a place to call home,” Leclerc says of her character. Sherry Stringfield ( ER), who starred in the first film of the book series - The Shunning - reprises her role as Katie’s wealthy philanthropist birth mother, Laura Mayfield-Bennett. Katie Leclerc ( Switched at Birth) stars as Katie Lapp, a naive, young Amish woman shunned by her township, who goes looking for her birth mother, who is dying of cancer. The film is an adaptation of best-selling author Beverly Lewis’ second novel in her Heritage of Lancaster County book series. Katie Leclerc stars in Beverly Lewis The Confession: The Amish return to the spotlight in the Hallmark Channel original film The Confession (premiering Saturday, May 11 at 9pm ET).

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Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window).Fearing he will lose his inheritance when he hears from Katie, he seizes on a scheme to pass off a struggling actress (“Once and Again’s” Julia Whelan) as Katie, hoping to secure access to his wife’s estate before she dies. This comes as bad news to Laura’s leech of a husband, Dylan (Adrian Paul), who needs his wife’s money to finance his gambling habit. Now out in the modern world, she seeks to reconnect with her birth mother, Laura (Stringfield), a wealthy socialite who early on is presented with a fatal cancer diagnosis. Leclerc plays Katie, who was “shunned” by the Amish community that raised her in the first film. It’s also enough of a stand-alone story one needn’t have thrilled to part one to join the buggy ride. To the rest of the world, this Hallmark Channel movie derived from the second of Lewis’ “The Heritage of Lancaster County” books is distinguished by possessing slightly more edge than the network’s standard fare, and a solid tandem in Katie Leclerc (“Switched at Birth”) and Sherry Stringfield (was “ER” really that long ago?) as its leads. For the hardy few to whom “Beverly Lewis’ The Confession” really is the much-anticipated sequel to “The Shunning,” its arrival is no doubt good news.

The shunning book series