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HER FEAR by Shelley Shepard Gray

HER FEAR

by Shelley Shepard Gray

Pub Date: July 24th, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-246921-2
Publisher: Avon Inspire/HarperCollins

When a pregnant, young Amish woman is betrayed by her boyfriend and banished from her abusive family, she’s sent to an uncle far away, where she meets an EMT who makes her believe in a better future.

Sadie Detweiler discovers she’s pregnant and expects to marry the man who’s been courting her, but instead he cruelly rejects her. Then her father takes her lover’s side: “He’s got no reason to lie, girl”—and turns his back on Sadie: “I’m not your father. You are nothing to me.” She is stunned and humiliated when he sends her away to stay with relatives. Just a few short weeks after she arrives in Kentucky, her grandmother Verba Stauffer dies, and she meets Noah, a kind Amish EMT. Noah knows something isn’t right in the Stauffer household. The family is secretive and suspicious, and at first he thinks perhaps they’re abusing the quiet, pretty Sadie. Soon it’s discovered that Verba was poisoned, and rumors fly that the Stauffers produce and distribute moonshine. Noah likes Sadie, but her family might be dangerous, and he’s not sure how to react to her pregnancy. Yet the more he learns about her, the more he realizes how horribly she’s been treated, especially by the men in her life. Author Gray continues her Amish of Hart County romantic suspense series, which ambles through a story that’s mildly entertaining but lacks depth and edge. The father is villainous, the hero is saintly, the uncle is cartoonishly ineffective and hand-wringing about it. And while the plot offers Sadie the divine gift of a safe new life, it shrugs over the poisoning deaths of four other people.

An oddly disconnected, lightly inspiring, and un-suspenseful inspirational romantic suspense novel.