When Stephanie Miller was 16 years old, her parents died in a car crash. The Amish teen was forced to live with her aunt and uncle, a dour couple who compelled her to do most of the household chores and to care for their growing family. Keeping a tight rein on the young woman, they allowed her to go to town only once a month to purchase a few items she couldn’t buy in their Amish community in Ohio.
Now, 23-year-old Stephanie still lives under the same strictures, pressured to feel grateful for her aunt and uncle’s so-called benevolence, which feels more like imprisonment than kindness.
Stephanie’s life is permanently altered when, on her monthly trip to town to make a few purchases at a dollar store, she witnesses a murder due to an aborted drug deal. Rescue arrives in a surprising way—a social worker named Bev Anderson snatches Stephanie from danger—and sets her on a trajectory that she could never have pictured in the confines of her sheltered life. Bev enlists the assistance of her brother Hardy to hide Stephanie on the enormous, heavily guarded ranch on which he works.
As Stephanie deals with post-traumatic stress, picturing the murder in her mind again and again, she also struggles to come to terms with the deaths of her parents, the loneliness of her teenage and young adult years, the truth about her life with her aunt and uncle, and questions about God’s plan for her: “What if this strange journey she was on was God’s will?”
As Stephanie learns to trust and open herself to the possibility of new beginnings, she discovers in Hardy a man with baggage of his own, yet who lives in the certainty of God’s healing embrace.
Geared to a female audience, this romantic thriller grapples with the painful experiences of wounded children living in foster care, the destruction meted out by gangs, and the consequences of the drug trade. Still, Shepard Gray points readers to God, who meets the brokenhearted where they live and brings restoration in desperate situations.
(Revell)