An Excerpt from CAPTIVES

Okay, folks! Here’s a short excerpt from the opening of Captives…

 

A

my’s coffin had been closed for over an hour, but Douglas Timothy still couldn’t get the image of his daughter’s dead body out of his mind. The girl in that box looked nothing like the Amy he had known—the Amy he had loved and raised. Instead, the girl in the coffin was an emaciated skeleton with sunken-in cheeks and eyes, pierced and tattooed beyond recognition. It had been difficult for them to dress and make her up in a fashion that hid signs of the life she had been leading before her death.

When they identified the body, Anne, his wife, had even gone so far as to say, “That’s not Amy. That can’t be Amy. It doesn’t look anything like her!” In his own desire to believe that Amy might still be alive, Douglas had been swayed momentarily. Maybe it wasn’t her. Maybe she was still out there and they just needed to keep looking. But he knew it wouldn’t do them any good to deny the truth. It might not have looked like Amy, but there was good reason for that.

Amy had been seventeen when they last saw her, a junior in high school preparing for college. Although hospitalized briefly when she was sixteen for an eating disorder, she had always appeared to be a strong-minded girl who filled her life with all sorts of activities. Amy was a member of the school’s swim team, drama club, and her church’s youth group. She was, by most accounts, a typical seventeen-year-old. The girl on the slab in the morgue was twenty, a prostitute shot full of drugs, a victim of sex trafficking.

A Glimpse into Captives

So what is Captives about?

Captives is a novel that explores the consequences of a society demanding, distributing, and enslaving through sexual exploitation, but offers a message of hope, recovery, and redemption through God’s saving grace.

Here's the summary:

When seventeen-year-old Amy Timothy disappears from a rural Virginia truck stop, world-renowned cellist Blaise Timothy puts her life on hold to join the search for her sister. While conducting her own investigation into Amy’s disappearance, Blaise seeks solace in addictive and destructive relationships.

Three years later, the search for Amy becomes a homicide investigation and catches the attention of national media and sex trafficking activists. Less than a mile from where Amy’s body is recovered, Andrew Victor attempts to manage a failing career in art, an addiction to pornography, and a family secret that links him to the murder investigation. In Washington, DC, Asha Edgewater knows first-hand the horrors of sex slavery and lends support to the Timothy family even as she comes to terms with her own past. As all three lives intersect in their search for redemption and healing, they find it is only possible through God’s saving grace.

Captives is available on Amazon Kindle and will release in paperback by next week.


Have a blessed weekend!

Captives Released!

It's out! Well, at least it's out on Kindle. The paperback version should be available by next week.


For the next few days, I plan to post on Captives, its characters, and its inception. I will also have a few posts on the very real problem of sex trafficking.


This novel has a long history that starts in 2006 with a paragraph I wrote as a brainstorming exercise. I’d wanted to write about human trafficking for some time, but the right story never surfaced. At the time, a good friend of mine was the sexual trafficking liaison at the Salvation Army, and she had supplied me with tons of good material, case studies, and statistics. It was grim reading, but I realized then that this was something important that people needed to know about (and a lot of people really didn’t know about it).


I started with Blaise’s narration telling the background of her sister’s disappearance via trafficking; I later added Asha’s story to show the international side; once I realized that pornography and prostitution were linked, Andrew’s narrative came into play.

The novel originally came out in 2009 and was titled All that is Right and Holy. That year it won second place in the Christian Choice Book Awards through Xulon Press.

In 2015, a lot has changed in both the spectrum and spread of trafficking, especially within the United States. With that in mind, I decided to update the novel and re-release it under a different title. My husband designed the new cover. I love it! What do you think?

When did you first become aware of human trafficking?

The Best Book I Read in July

It’s time for the best book I read this month and The Cephalopod Coffeehouse hosted by The Armchair Squid. We gather once a month to talk about the best books we’ve read over the past few weeks.

Mercy’s Rain by Cindy K. Sproles is set in the late 1800s and traces the journey of Mercy Roller, a young girl living in the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee, who must come to terms with her angry, revengeful heart brought on by a childhood of abuse and brutality.

Mercy’s father, Pastor Roller, is a cruel man with a desire to inflict pain and anguish on his wife and children under the guise of spiritual cleansing and holiness. He sexually and physically abuses his daughter and tries to burn and freeze his wife to death; he hits, hangs, drowns, and commits infanticide. He is evil incarnate and Mercy, finally reaches her breaking point when he kills a local boy.

Her heart full of hate, Mercy shows no mercy when it comes to The Pastor’s punishment for his crime, and years later she readily confesses to herself and others that she had a hand in her own father’s killing. Once she leaves her home and all of its terrible memories and settles among friends who need her child-minding help, Mercy experiences a different life—one that could offer happiness and redemption. Even so, she is haunted by her memories and struggles to forgive herself and those who have hurt her, and experience the very quality after which she is named. Mercy must decide whether she will allow herself to love and let go of the past, finally accepting God’s grace and healing.

Mercy’s Rain is an intense, emotional story, beautifully developed and constructed by Sproles’s fine prose. It is not a novel for the faint-hearted, but it is one for the broken-hearted. Mercy’s journey from broken, bitter, and angry to a girl who desires to love and be loved rings true and is not at all contrived. The novel’s painfully realistic portrait of domestic abuse is part of what makes it so powerful. This is not feel-good inspirational fiction; this is gritty, soul-searching, life-changing story telling—a rushing river of realization that people experience this sort of brokenness every day and must choose between hating and forgiving. Mercy’s hurt is a deep well, and she must decide if God’s love is enough to fill it.

If you'd like to look at some other good reads, check out some of my fellow coffeehouse bloggers' favorite reads this month.

What’s the best book you’ve read this month?    

 

 

Two Guest Blogs today!

Today I'm doubly blessed to be hosted by Crooks on Books and The Story Behind the Book! Check out my guest blog posts on both sites!

Two Book Tour Stops Today!

I have two virtual book tours overlapping at the moment. My tour with Pump Up Your Book starts today at The Examiner.  I'm also visiting Celia Kennedy's blog today with Fiction Addiction tours. You can check out that link HERE and enter the amazon gift card giveaway!

Song from the Ashes Release Day!

At long last Song from the Ashes is available for purchase!

You can purchase the Kindle version through Amazon (paperback version isn't available just yet, but coming in a few days), or you can buy the paperback or ebook directly through eLectio Publishing. If you buy the paperback through the publisher, you'll receive an ebook for free.




The link to Barnes and Noble for the Nook is also available. The paperback will be available through B&N soon.

If you enjoy Song from the Ashes, please consider leaving an honest review at Amazon, Goodreads, or Barnes and Noble.

The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in him, and he helps me. My heart leaps for joy, and with my song I praise him. (Psalm 28:7)

Kingsport Series: Good Times!

There are a lot of great things to do in the Kingsport area (for every interest and taste), and in this post I thought I would highlight some of them.

When I was a kid, my dad used to take me to Bays Mountain for the water slides. You know, those watery thrill rides where you ride down on a rubber mat (at least you hope you ride down on the mat) and try to avoid being run over by the man behind you who weighs 150 pounds more than you do and is traveling three times faster than you are? 

Yeah, those. Anyway, I have such good memories from those water-slide weekends. I don't think the water slides are there anymore, but never fear! For those who want water, there is the Kingsport Aquatic Center. This facility boasts several pools including a competitive pool and a warm water pool, a water activity park, and lazy river.


If you're still up for the outdoors, but don't want to swim, Bays Mountain Park and Planetarium is chock full of possibilities. It is a 3,550 acre nature preserve (right now they have wolf pups!), and there are hiking trails galore! There's also a state-of-the-art planetarium on site (we used to field trip there with my elementary school when I was a kid), and the planetarium shows are reasonably priced ($4.00!!).


For history buffs, Kingpsort is rife with possibilities. I'll only list two here: Allandale Mansion and Netherland Inn. My husband and I were married at Allandale in 2006.

It's a well-known point-of-interest in Kingsport. It can be rented for all sorts of functions, and its grounds are beautiful. http://www.allandalemansion.com/

Netherland Inn is on the National Register of Historical Sites and built around 1802. Seasonal events are often hosted there, and several presidents (Jackson, Johnson, Polk) are said to have stayed the night there while traveling through Tennessee. Some say it's haunted...

If you're into motor sports, well--you are in luck! The Bristol Motor Speedway is just off I-81 and every August the masses descend upon the entire area for NASCAR racing. Attendees rent out and take over people's homes, and you can't get a hotel room from Bristol to Knoxville.

Finally, for those with more "refined" tastes, the local area now hosts several vineyards and wineries(many which have produced award-winning wines). Reedy Creek Winery is located at Meadowview (a golf course and conference center), but they still produce their wines on site; Countryside Vineyards is located in Blountville just off of I-81, and so is the Corey Ippolito Vineyard and B&B.

So there you have it! A taste of the Tri-Cities in a snapshot. A little something for everyone!

Wait! What? Does Kingsport have a beach?
Umm...sadly, no. But it does have Boone Lake and the Holston River! Does that count?

http://www.tennesseelakeinfo.com/boone/

www.visitkingsport.com