A Distant Shore: A Novel

Product Description

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“
Inspirational fiction superstar” (Publishers Weekly) and #1 New York Times bestselling author of life-changing fiction returns with this high-stakes love story of danger, passion, and faith.

She was a child caught in a riptide in the Caribbean Sea. He was a teenager from the East Coast on vacation with his family. He dove in to save her, and that single terrifying moment changed both their lives forever.

Ten years later Jack Ryder is a daring secret agent with the FBI and Eliza Lawrence still lives on that pristine island. She’s an untainted princess in a kingdom of darkness and evil, on the brink of a forced marriage with a dangerous neighboring drug lord, a marriage arranged by her father.

This time when Jack and Eliza meet, there’s a connection neither of them can explain. Both their lives are on the line, and once again, the stakes are deadly high. Can they join forces in a complicated and dangerous mission, pretending to have a breathtaking love…without really falling?

Sometimes miracles happen not once, but twice…along a distant shore.

Review

“A high stakes story of danger, love, and deep faith.” ―
Woman’s World

“A daring story of love and redemption.”

  ―
Booklist, starred review

About the Author

Karen Kingsbury,
 #1 
New York Times bestselling novelist, is America’s favorite inspirational storyteller, with more than twenty-five million copies of her award-winning books in print. Her last dozen titles have topped bestseller lists and many of her novels are under development as major motion pictures. Her Baxter Family books were developed into a TV series. Karen is also an adjunct professor of writing at Liberty University. She and her husband, Donald, live in Tennessee near their children and grandchildren.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. For You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.

—Psalm 23:4

The long ago moment danced and breathed and lived inside her.

Mama’s voice singing in the warm Belizean breeze, the way it had every afternoon at this time, calling them in from an afternoon of gathering eggs and tending to the chickens. “Lizzie James, dinner! Bring your brother!”

“Yes, Mama!” And Lizzie was shading her eyes so she could see her mother standing in the distance, just outside their small thatched-roof house. Long brown hair blowing over her shoulders. Eyes the same pale blue as Lizzie’s. Happy eyes.

And in this, her most precious memory, Lizzie was grabbing hold of her little brother’s hand. “Let’s go, Daniel. Rice pudding for dinner. Your favorite.”

In the memory, Lizzie was eight and Daniel was six, the two of them inseparable. Half the day they sat side by side at the village schoolhouse learning their numbers and memorizing Scripture. The other half they worked the fields or played in the grassy school yard.

But in this moment, before their daddy moved away—all they wanted was to be home for dinner. Daniel was running beside her, laughing because their cousins’ Labrador retriever puppy, Milo, was galloping out to greet them, and just ahead their mother was waiting for them. Smiling at them, arms wide, and she was pulling them close.

Of all God’s gifts, she was saying,
you two are my favorite.

Lizzie blinked and the images disappeared. Again.

She wasn’t in her mother’s arms and Daniel wasn’t beside her and they weren’t about to eat Mama’s rice pudding. Milo was long gone and this wasn’t her Mennonite village. She hadn’t been there in a year at least. Instead she was nine years old, standing on the smallest beach in all of Belize. And no one called her Lizzie Susan James.

She was Eliza Ann Lawrence.

Mennonite men never leave their families. That’s what Mama said. But Lizzie’s daddy had left them and moved here for his very important job, here to Belize City. Where Mama and