Christian novels – goodchristianfiction

A young woman looking to re-build her future gets caught up in a decades-old mystery, in my latest novel, available now on Amazon.

1952, a season of murder in the small, West Texas town of Moseby, and Annabelle Rafter knows more about it than even she realizes. As Dr. Hunt Rafter’s wife, she’s seen plenty of children coming into the world and sewn up more ruffians than she’d like, including Henry Runyon, her best friend, Sally’s, wayward brother-in-law. Henry Runyon has gone missing, though only the stars know he lays in the tall grass, a victim of his own bad deeds. And the murders of an entire family remain unsolved as 1952 fades into decades without answers.

In 1988, the horrors of 1952 hang heavy in the air as Texas Ranger Peter Clemmons arrives in Moseby shortly after a skeleton gets discovered outside of town. He’s convinced the skeleton holds the key to the mystery of the 1952 murders, a mystery his grandfather investigated but never solved.

Peter isn’t the only newcomer. Mary Runyon, newly alone in the world, follows the clues in some old letters to discover her one remaining relative, her long-lost grandmother, Sally. Guided by Sally and her best friend Annie (Annabelle), Mary seeks to re-build her shattered life. And when Mary gets caught up in the same mystery with Peter, she joins him in probing Annie for the secrets the doctor’s widow seems to keep.

Weaving between the past and the year 1988, this mystery novel tells the stories about love and loss that make up any well-lived life.

I thank you for considering this novel, my eighth. The character of Annabelle has been brewing in my imagination since I was a child, watching my grandmother make chocolate pies, using her thick kitchen knife to open cans like a warrior princess in the sand-dune “wilderness” of West Texas where she quilted and tended a veritable zoo of animals and told me stories about Bonnie and Clyde. The “regular-ness” of people grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and held fast, how the most mundane of tasks could transform depending upon the character of the person performing it.

In the grittiness of living, we will have struggles and sadness and pain, but in God we have the hope of Jesus’ promise: “I have overcome the world.” If my writing does anything, I sincerely pray it affirms your faith in a loving, all-knowing God who cares for you and has issued an open invitation for all to believe in His Son, who died for the sins of all so that we may know hope in this world and everlasting peace in the next.

I write to you as someone who knows a little about the pain of this world. In February 2014, my grandmother, she of warrior fame, passed away. Around this time, my mother noticed that her fingers were losing strength. By October, my father, mother, and I were in a hospital room in downtown Houston getting the official diagnosis of my mother’s ALS. The horrors of that disease are more than a person should have to bear, and yet my mother, the bravest of us all, managed to give us her sweet smile, even after all her muscle control was lost, drilling her world down to one blink or two.

The hope of salvation helped me cope with the challenges of these times, knowing that Jesus’ loving arms waited to embrace my mother when she passed from this world into the next. His promises to love us, to lighten our burdens, to forgive our failings, all comforted me when I needed to get out of bed for another day and another.

Knowing God’s Word became even more of a blessing during the trying times of these last years, watching my mother die so horribly and then dealing with the loss of her. Whenever I despair, I am able to pull myself up again by looking toward the promises in the Holy Bible. God is my refuge, rock, and fortress. Many psalms reflect my feelings, showing me that God wants my honesty and can take my pain. Paul assures me God can take anything that happens to me, even my mother’s death, and bring something good out of it for me.

Never doubt that evil exists in this world, but that God will shine His light in the darkness. As Christians, we must strive constantly to remain on the narrow path in that light. When we accept Jesus as our Savior, we are imbued with the Holy Spirit, who offers us the insight to seek that light, even though the devil, the master of evil, actively seeks to pull us into the dark.

But God promises to conquer evil. In the last days, He will return to vanquish the devil. In that world, we will know ultimate peace. We will feel love as we have never felt it before. We will be in our forever home.

I pray my characters show people how to manage a Christian life, even when we stumble from the narrow way. If even one person comes to know Christ through my writing, then I feel I will have fulfilled God’s purpose for me in this world.

May His will be done in your life as well.

If you enjoy my novels, please leave a review for me. These reviews help other readers discover a good read, and they help me reach more people. You can also discover more of my books at ramonalevacy.com.

In Christ,
Ramona

Find Thicker than Blood on Kindle.

When I taught college freshmen English, a lifetime ago, we used a textbook titled, Works in Progress. The concept was that any writing is a process of planning, researching, planning some more, writing, editing, and editing, and editing. We would require multiple drafts of the same paper from our students. We emphasized group critiquing to help them find their own mistakes better once they had the easier practice of seeing the mistakes in somebody else’s writing.

In other words, if they learned nothing else, the students learned that writing is most definitely a serious business. But they also learned that writing is a fluid one too. I would remind them that even published poets have been known to interrupt a reading to correct a word and explain that the next time that particular poem was published, the poem would be “corrected.”

Mark Twain put it this way: “Find the right word, not its second cousin.”

Admittedly, my blog posts are thoughts I have prayerfully crafted to convey thoughts I feel the Holy Spirit has laid on my heart to share, but there is an immediacy to blogging that doesn’t lend itself to the laying aside of a finished draft for the needed perspective that makes for truly great editing.

My fiction writing is different. Once I complete a novel, I have to let it set for a while before returning to it. I need the “this is my baby, so it must be perfect” feelings to wear off so I can more truly see the novel for what it is.

I know that there are as many ways to craft a novel as there are people out there trying to do it. Of course, there are core truths to a good story that any good novel should have. If you are new to writing, you should study the kinds of novels or writing you want to do to help you determine those elements and patterns.

Of course, my master’s degree in English is with an emphasis on creative writing. I have even taught creative writing at the sophomore level at university. But, I always have new things to learn about improving this craft that I love.

My latest draft is a spin-off of my last novel, The Texas Stray. It is giving me fits because it covers themes and characters that are outside my comfort zone and experience. One character does not know Christ. Another is on the path to finding Christ again. The novel covers issues like divorce, alcoholism, and adultery because some of my characters are truly broken. My goal is to create a story that shows how God unbreaks us.

There are questions that keep me up at night about this draft. Can I do some of these subjects justice? I am not experienced first-hand with the three issues I just mentioned (by the grace of God). My main hope is to tell God’s truth about these types of things without being judgmental or insensitive. I know it can be done because I have known people who have survived these things and held on to their belief or found their belief in the Creator.

My other worry is how I have labeled my novels so far. I call them Christian Fiction because God is at the core of the writing I do. However, do I mislead? In other words, even though it is possible to grow up in a household where people don’t curse or get divorced or cheat at Monopoly (I know because I grew up in such a household), is it wrong to call a novel a Christian novel if some of the characters are not so good? What if even your main character says a bad word or makes a dumb decision?

These questions are especially perplexing to me with my latest draft because my main characters are really fallen people in a fallen world who have a hard time finding their ways to redemption. They have material distractions, a wavering moral compass, and holes in their souls they don’t even know how to define, much less fill. In other words, I am telling a story that is largely overshadowed by what not to do. Does that make it a less Christian novel in some way?

As I begin the true editing process of this work, I have narrowed down the overriding themes of my first draft. Do I have too many or are they closely-related enough to work together? Most importantly, how do I integrate God’s answers to my characters’ struggles without it seeming to be “preachy” instead of being woven naturally into the narrative?

These are not questions I expect anyone to answer for me. I have to answer them myself. I offer them here as a peek through the looking glass that is the writer’s process. It is a laborious task with very little benefit at the end of it for most. (There can be only so many Francine Rivers or Tracie Petersons out there.) But, I do it anyway because I feel compelled to write.

My goal is not to eventually quit my day job. My thought is that I will continue to labor in full faith that God will get His message to the people He put me here to use this talent to get the message to. That’s why I write a blog as often as I feel I have something to contribute. That’s why I spend my free time sweating over storylines and characters knowing that the finished work will be something I publish myself, my only hopeful goal the other-worldly one we all seek, that of the Father blessing our final journey with these two words: “Well done.”

Like the essays my college freshmen grudgingly turned into their overworked TA so many years ago, this life of mine is too a work in progress. Thank YOU for joining me for part of the journey. This yoke we share is not a heavy one, according to the ONE WHO SAVES. May your burdens this day be light.

In Christ,
Ramona