Saturday, August 20, 2016

The Loyal Heart by Shelley Shepard Gray - REVIEWED


About the Book:
Robert came to Galveston to fulfill his promise to a dying man and look after his widow. He didn’t expect to find love in the unlikeliest of places.
Robert Truax, former Second Lieutenant and Confederate officer in the Civil War, made a promise to his comrade Phillip Markham. If anything happened to Phillip, Robert would look after his beloved wife, Miranda. She was his life, his world, his everything. 
After the war, Robert is left to pick up the pieces and fulfill his pact. When he arrives at Miranda’s home in Galveston, Texas, things are worse than he imagined. Phillip’s name has been dragged through the mud, everyone in town believes him to be a traitor, and his widow is treated as an outcast. Even more disturbing is her emotional well-being. Miranda seems hopeless, lost, and so very alone.
Robert had thought his duty would be simple. He would help Miranda as quickly as possible in order to honor a promise. But the moment Robert laid eyes on her, his plans changed. He’s mesmerized by her beauty and yearns to help her in any way he can.
He makes it his duty to protect Miranda, turn her reputation around, and to find some way to help her smile again. But it doesn’t prove to be an easy task—Robert knows something about
Phillip that could shake Miranda to the core and alter her view of the man she thought she knew so well.
My Thoughts:
It seems your loyalty knows no bounds.”  (p. 292)

The Civil War is a period of U.S. history that redefined and challenged the definition of loyalty on many levels.  Shelly Shepard Gray’s latest novel explores that loyalty in an ingenious way.  The Loyal Heart follows the life of Miranda Markham as she tries to rebuild her life as a widow of her husband, Second Lieutenant Phillip Markham.  It seems someone in her hometown of Galveston, Texas has determined that Miranda needs to be as absent from life as her late husband, and she begins to be threatened  in her own home, and begins to despair of life.

What she could never imagined is that her husband served with a group of men who vowed an oath of loyalty to her husband, and one by one, each of the men begin to appear in her life and begin  the arduous task of getting to the bottom of the mysterious threat that has come to haunt every moment of Miranda’s life.  What unfolds is both frightening and miraculous, and readers will find their hearts captured by both the plot and the characters!
War has made people desperate, and those who come to the pages of this novel will be surprised by the many twists and turns this plot takes!  Readers will also be surprised to watch new relationships develop between characters that seem determined to resist any romantic involvement at all!  In short, this is a novel filled with surprises, and by the time you reach the end of the novel, you heart and mind will be well satisfied!

Purchase you copy HERE!

About the Author:
Shelley Shepard Gray is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author, a finalist for the American Christian Fiction Writers prestigious Carol Award, and a two-time HOLT Medallion winner. She lives in southern Ohio, where she writes full-time, bakes too much, and can often be found walking her dachshunds on her town's bike trail.  Find Shelley on her website, www.shelleyshepardgray.com, on Facebook: ShelleyShepardGray, and on Twitter @ShelleySGray.

No comments: