The water keeper /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A riveting story of heroism, heartache, and the power of love to heal all wounds by New York Times bestselling author Charles Martin.

Murphy Shepherd is a man with many secrets. He lives alone on an island, tending the grounds of a church with no parishioners, and he's dedicated his life to rescuing those in peril. But as he mourns the loss of his mentor and friend, Murph himself may be more lost than he realizes.

When he pulls a beautiful woman named Summer out of Florida's Intracoastal Waterway, Murph's mission to lay his mentor to rest at the end of the world takes a dangerous turn. Drawn to Summer, and desperate to find her missing daughter, Murph is pulled deeper and deeper into the dark and dangerous world of modern-day slavery.

With help from some unexpected new friends, including a faithful Labrador he plucks from the ocean and an ex-convict named Clay, Murph must race against the clock to locate the girl before he is consumed by the secrets of his past--and the ghosts who tried to bury them.

With Charles Martin's trademark lyricism and poignant prose, The Water Keeper is at once a tender love story and a heartrending search for freedom.

"Charles Martin fans rejoice, because he's done it again . . . a multilayered story woven together with grace and redemption, and packed tight with tension and achingly real characters." --Lauren Denton, USA TODAY bestselling author of The Hideaway

Part of The Murphy Shepherd series: Book 1: The Water Keeper Book 2: The Letter Keeper Book 3: The Record Keeper Coming July 2022!) Full-length novel Includes discussion questions for book clubs Also by Charles Martin: The Mountain Between Us, Send Down the Rain, Long Way Gone, When Crickets Cry, Chasing Fireflies

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Martin (The Mountain Between Us; Long Way Gone) excels at writing characters who exist in the margins of life. Murphy Shepherd lives alone, doing maintenance work for a church that no one attends and trying to heal from scars gained rescuing others who dwell in the margins. His specialty is finding trafficked young girls and leading them from brokenness to freedom, but Shepherd thinks he has given everything he has and it may be time to retire. His hermetic healing process is interrupted when he rescues a woman named Summer in Florida's Intercoastal Waterway and gets drawn into a hunt after a gang of international human traffickers. The strength of the story is in the friends he picks up along the way: a dying ex-con, an intelligent Labrador, and a hardened young girl with as many secrets as Shepherd himself. VERDICT Martin deftly unwinds Shepherd's backstory in between high-octane chase scenes. Readers who enjoy flawed yet likable characters created by authors such as John Grisham and Nicholas Sparks will want to start reading Martin's fiction.--Christine Barth, Scott Cty. Lib. Syst., IA