I’ve been asked more than once: Why write suspense through a Christian lens? Why not just offer hope? The answer is simple: Hope without honesty isn’t hope, it’s evasion. In Shadows of Mercy, there are no altar calls. No open Bibles on nightstands. No sudden conversions under glowing streetlamps. What there is, intentionally, is a scarred Marine who hasn’t prayed in eight years, a grieving counselor who questions whether grace even applies to men like him, and a boy who only speaks through drawings because the world taught him silence was safer. This isn’t a rejection of faith. It’s a deeper fidelity to it. Too often, Christian fiction flattens the human experience into a before-and-after binary. Lost versus found, broken versus healed, darkness versus light. But real life, and real faith, live in the in-between. In the fog over the harbor. In the silence between Amen. In the moment you choose to stay, not because you’ve figured it all out, but because someone else is still drowning. Mercy, I’ve come to believe, doesn’t shine despite the shadows. It moves through them. It’s not a feeling. It’s a verb. It’s Mara handing Ethan a bowl of stew when he’s covered in blood. It’s Delaney stitching his wound without asking for his testimony first. It’s Mateo drawing a net full of stars and naming it truth. That’s the kind of mercy I want to write toward: - Not soft, but sharp. - Not easy, but chosen. - Not loud, but relentless. Shadows of Mercy is my attempt to honor that. No manipulation. No manufactured piety. Just people, flawed, frightened, faithful in their own quiet way, learning that the most sacred act isn’t speaking for God, but speaking a name the world tried to bury. Because sometimes, that’s how resurrection begins. - Riaan Schlebusch Author of Shadows of Mercy | Literary Christian Fiction Rooted in Truth, Not Trope #faith #christian