Rachel Stone’s car breaks down on the edges of Salvation, North Carolina, the one place on the planet where the most people hate her. Rachel’s former husband, the Reverend Snopes was a hugely popular tele-evangelist who conned people all over the country out of their life savings, making Rachel his scape goat when he got caught. He died in a plane crash fleeing the country, but Rachel knows there are five million still left unaccounted for, and as she currently has about eleven dollars to her name and a five-year-old to support, she was hoping to sneak back into town to search their old house for any clues to where the money might be hidden.
Gabe Bonner is a broken man. His wife and little boy were killed by a drunk driver some years back, and he wasn’t living in Salvation when the Snopes lived there. Hence he doesn’t know who Rachel is at first. He has no sympathy when her car breaks down next to the drive in he’s trying to restore, though, and wants her off his property. Her boy, Edward, is tiny, sickly and cowardly, but still a painful reminder of the child Gabe lost. Rachel is stubborn, feisty and far too skinny, yet Gabe finds his body responding to her for the first time since his wife died. All the more reason that he wants the Stones to go far away. Instead, he finds himself persuaded to hire Rachel to help him with the restoration work, and puts her up in his dead grandmother’s house.
Full review here.