Review – Healing Promises

Healing Promises, the second book in Amy Wallace’s Defender’s of Hope series reunites all of our favorite characters from book one, Ransomed Dreams. Though all the characters are present, Healing Promises focuses on FBI Agent Clint Rollins and his oncologist wife, Sara, who struggles when Clint is diagnosed with cancer.

The book charges out of the gate with scenes featuring Clint, Michael, and Steven hard at work in the Crimes Against Children Unit at the FBI. As in Ransomed Dreams, the suspense plot in Healing Promise revolves around finding missing children, but this time we have a serial killer on the loose. One who loves to share his thinking and deeds with the readers in a very realistic way.

Healing Promises is a solid read that delves deeply into the characters personal lives and their struggle with trusting God to care for them. Wallace brings us a powerful message that we all can relate to as we battle on a daily basis with the many challenging blows we face.

In Healing Promises, Wallace has followed many of the writing techniques employed by good writers. The most notable, is to make your characters suffer and when you think they’ve had enough, make them suffer more. Wallace takes the characters in this book to their breaking point and then ups the ante, much as God seems to do in our lives. Wallace has done a thorough job of researching cancer treatments and provides the readers with just the right amount of information to make them understand the tremendous struggle involved in surviving this disease, but not too much to overpower the story.

Though this is a suspense novel, as it has the missing children theme woven through out and has very realistic scenes that delve into the killer’s motivations, I found it to be equally or more so a contemporary novel featuring faith, love, loss, and relationship struggles. The suspense plot moves the story forward, but it’s the characters that make this book well worth the read. So if you’re looking for a rush to the finish action packed suspense book this isn’t the story for you, but if you want to combine suspense and savor a little romance and a lot of personal life struggles along the way, pick up Healing Promises. You won’t be disappointed.