Lady in the Mist

I want to apologize for the lack of posts in the last week. I've had some family stuff come up that has left me with little time to read much less post. The winner of last week's contest, Always True, is Linda. Congratulations to her! Today I'll get right into my review and hopefully things will get back to normal fairly soon.

Lady in the Mist by Laurie Alice Eakes is the first book in the Midwives series. Tabitha works as the midwife in her coastal Virginia community in the early years of the nineteenth century. She inhabits a gray zone there, where because of her unmarried state she doesn't fit in with the other families, but she's not quite a servant either. After the deaths of her father, mother, and finally grandmother that left her alone, she's turned her back on God for his apparent abandonment and throws herself into her work. But that work is endangered when the husband of one of her patients dies along with her unborn child mysteriously and he lays the blame at her feet. Her former fiance, Raleigh Trower, has returned from the sea where he fled to get out of their engagement and is now determined to win back her heart, but redemptioner Dominick Cherrett keeps getting in the way. Tabitha and Dominick are thrown together again and again as each tries to spy on the other in the hopes of discovering who is behind the disappearance of so many men from their small town. Eakes has written a powerful romance with plenty of intrigue. Tabitha, Dominick, and Raleigh each suffer under the impression that we must earn God's love, and when we sin, we need to earn it back. The villain is fairly obvious from early on, but Eakes does a good job of throwing out some red herrings and keeping the suspense high. Sometimes she does so, however, by leaving the reader at a moment of high tension and then skipping ahead several hours or days without giving readers the payoff of following the characters through their struggles. This is still a terrifically entertaining historical romance with twists and turns and a healthy dose of faith. I look forward to the next book in the series.

Thank you to Revell for providing me with a copy of this book for review. Available February 2011 from Revell, a division of the Baker Publishing Group at your favorite bookseller.