Being a Sheriff’s Deputy is not all about saving lives and arresting criminals, and each day Grace wonders if she’ll make it home.
While kids at the schools Deputy Grace Halling visits see her as the knight in blue-cotton armor, people involved in the cases she is dispatched to have a different opinion. She has every confidence in her ability to do her job and arrest criminals. She easily takes down a knife-wielding woman and a drunken combatant teenager without hesitation. Everyone—victim, suspect, or witness—has a story to tell or to lie about, and Grace is never perturbed by their tales.
That all changes when she looks down the barrel of a gun. She loses confidence in her ability as a deputy, she loses trust in herself and fellow officers, and she struggles to stay afloat as shift after shift passes. Grace cannot find her rhythm of being a deputy again. And when the Police Chaplain unexpectedly barges into her life, her personal and professional lives are flipped upside down. Grace struggles to find her even ground, worrying that the next time she stares a murderer in the face will be the last.
Parables and riddles can’t undo the confusion Deputy Grace Halling experiences after her close call with death. Each morning she wakes up, puts on a uniform that feels far more like a target, and goes out to enforce the laws and protect the innocent. While her comrades in blue are murdered one by one with each passing month, Grace pushes for a call to action from her Captain. Her worst fear has become a reality.
Grace doesn’t know if she’s next.
Learning to trust herself again wasn’t easy. Deputy Grace Halling is back patrolling, and after a few months of quiet, murders of her comrades in blue begin again. Scared and determined, Grace follows every lead she can until she finds herself face to face with the barrel of a gun, only this time her finger is on the trigger.
Detective Grace Halling has a nice ring to it, or so Grace thought until she receives her first case.
Grace has been visiting Harold Crighton for years, and when he suddenly goes missing from the Campbell Home with seemingly no trace, her world is thrown into a spin. From finding her feet as a detective to learning how to be a better girlfriend to Amya and trying to find her place in a new and different world of no longer being a beat cop, Grace plows ahead and grits her teeth.
Although not the lead detective on Harold’s case, Grace is determined to put as much effort into finding him as possible. That is until she’s saddled with her own case and her focus becomes divided.
AVAILABLE DECEMBER 1, 2021
With two new cases in hand, Detective Grace Halling is determined to solve them before Christmas. A missing teenage foster kid Grace suspects is running from something bigger than anyone knows, and a missing middle-aged dad walked out of his front door without his shoes in the dead of winter.
Meanwhile, Amya’s parents are in town for the holiday, Peter’s home from seminary for the break, and a new kid crashes on Grace’s couch after being kicked out of her house. Grace can barely keep up. Focused on happy endings, Grace can’t help the feeling someone might break before she can save them.
Grace has never been so intent on righting wrongs.
Young & Old (Missing persons #3) COMING 2022
Adrian J. Smith 