Cover Reveal of The Translator’s War

Cover Reveal of The Translator’s War

by | Oct 1, 2026 | Announcements, Book News, Books, Cover Designs

It’s Time!

For Another Cover Reveal!!

There are some stories that just grab me by the heart and don’t let me go. I never know which ones are going to do that, not until I’m working on them. And then…they consume me. My mind is thoroughly caught up in the storyworld that I probably walk around my world in a bit of a daze. (Okay, no probably about it. My husband laughs that he can always tell when I’m in a writing groove because I’m not quite “here.”) The Translator’s War, coming June 2027, is one of those books. And I am so, so excited to get to show you the “face” of this story!

Translator, Spy, woman of faith

Amalie de Clarens

With a photographic memory and a sweet disposition that invites trust, Amalie has been gathering information from the Germans for whom she’s been translating since the start of the war…but after the professor who’d been her only link to the Allies is executed, she has no way of gettin all this information to those who need it.

Amalie, however, is determined to help her country and tosses herself time and again “into the lion’s den” to discover all she can about the German military. But when a friendship with a German scientist/officer’s daughter makes way for unprecedented discovery, Amalie’s no longer certain where to draw her lines. It’s easy to call the men her enemies. But sweet Trudi? That’s something altogether different.

And then there’s Jules. The college friend she dreamed of for years, the one she keeps thinking about even though she hasn’t seen him since the war began…and the man who ends up pulling her back into intelligence work. Amalie is more than willing to help…though she suspects the cost may well be her heart.

Mathematician, Statistician, and groundbreaking intelligencer…

Jules Lamarque

When Jules was given permission to run his own cell of Alliance, France’s largest intelligence network, he was determined to try a few methods no one else had yet attempted, fully insulating and protecting each cell and, when possible, each agent. Using his Vichy-approved job with a youth organization that toured the country doing repair work as a cover, he soon had a large and impressive sub-organization called the Druids feeding information to the Allies. But he’s been on the lookout for one particular person to recruit–Amalie. An old friend from university, he knows that she, with her incredible mind and memory, could be an invaluable asset. And when he finally happens across her path, she’s quick to accept his offer.

Now all he needs to to do is keep his distance personally and convince her that the date they’d never gone on when war broke out and interrupted was a mistake the universe had spared them…not one to invite again.

The Interludes…

Ravensbrück Concentration Camp

But the story doesn’t begin in Paris of 1943. The story actually plunges you straight into August of 1944, when Amalie is being processed at Ravensbrück concentration camp. With a razor scraping over her skull, taking her hair…and trying to take her identity. The story begins with what should be defeat.

But it isn’t. This remarkable woman’s story, inspired by the real-life Jeannie Rousseau, doesn’t end with arrest. In many ways, it begins with it. In the camps, she deems it her job to spread hope…and information.

Exactly as she’d done on the outside as well.

A Soul-Stirring

World War II Romance

From Amalie’s escapades in the concentration camp to the adventures in Paris and Germany that led her there, The Translator’s War is a story of discoveries that change the course of history, a remarkable mind, a sacrificial love, and the true cost of war.

Ready? Here it is!
The cover of The Translator’s War!

What do you think??

The first thing to grab my eye in this one is the arch, which I absolutely LOVE. I’ve always been a fan of them on other covers (and I have one of my own, on A Noble Scheme), so I was thrilled to see this arrangement. This is, of course, more a symbolic cover than an actual scene–while Amalie does discover information about the V-1 and V-2 rocket programs, she never actually saw the rocket at the secret base where it was being developed…but we decided that a little poetic license on the cover was just fine, given the enormous role that rocket plays in the story.

And of course, we gotta love Amalie, doing some on-the-fly translating!

Pre-Order Now!

Something new!

For the first time ever, I am going to be offering a LIMITED EDITION version
with PRINTED EDGES!!

I’ve done printed edges on my fantasies, but never before on my historicals.
To purchase the Limited Edition, just go to the pre-order link above
and select “printed edges” from the menu.
(Since we have the secret Baltic installation on the cover, I went with Paris on the edges!)

The Official Description

She wanted to use her talents to help liberate France.
She had no idea it would cost her nearly everything.

Paris, 1943. Amelie de Clarens is a woman of exceptional talent. Fluent in five languages and gifted with a photographic memory, she is forced to return home from university when the Nazis march into Paris. Desperate to use her skills to aid the Resistance, she soon finds a position as a German translator where she gathers intelligence she hopes to smuggle to the Allies. But she faces a major problem: since the attacks in Paris, Amelie has been unable to contact the Resistance. Then a chance meeting reunites her with Jules Lamarque, the man she’d once been in love with and who now leads a prestigious intelligence cell.

Jules runs his cell with strict rules of mathematics and statistics. Every agent, every source must be redundant, replaceable, and isolated to mitigate the risk. After drawing Amelie into the work, he soon realizes she is none of those things. Then rumblings come that German scientists are developing a bomb more powerful than anything seen before, one that could decimate the entire city of London in a single strike. When Jules is ordered to send Amelie to spy on the German rocket program at a major military installment, both of them will discover the true cost of war . . . and the incredible strength and love required to survive the unimaginable.

New Every Morning

New Every Morning

by | Sep 24, 2026 | Thoughtful Thursdays

I live in the Appalachian Mountains (the part that pronounces it APP-uh-LAY-shun, not LATCH-uhn, thank you). My house is in the middle of a forest, trees towering all around. Here, we can track the drift of the seasons quite easily, as leaves first bud in a splendor of white and yellow and pink, then spread a curtain of brightest green over the hillsides, then darken to emerald, then move into a fire of red and orange and yellow, then drift away into brown and the gray of bare limbs.

Those changing seasons never fail to make me smile in appreciation. But they’re a slow crawl, over the course of the year. The landscape doesn’t do rapid changes–and if it does, it’s usually a bad thing. Trees downed by a storm, gullies carved by a flood.

The other day, though, as my husband and I were walking the beach during our vacation, I realized that one of the reasons I love escaping to a place like this for my holiday is because literally every morning, it’s new.

The tides are constantly changing, and changing the beach with it. One day it will be still and calm, the tide will be out, and the beach will be wide and solid and undisturbed. The next day, the waves will be frothing, the wind will be whipping, wiping out any hint of human footprints, and the tide will be carving cliffs into the sand. When we set off from our rented house, we can see glimpses of the ocean from our upper decks, but we have no idea what the beach will look like. Not until we trek along the wandering path over the dunes, evading cacti and burrs and swatting at mosquitos, and then finally emerge into the loose sand.

Will the beach be wide or narrow today? Is the tide in or out? Soft sand or hard? Windswept clean or still bearing yesterday’s footprints? 

It’s new. Every morning, it’s new. And if you stay down there long enough, you can watch it renew itself with every surge of the tide in and draw of it out. And as I walk the waterline, those verses fill my head each and every time. 

“The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.”
~ Lamentations 3:22-23 (ESV)

Perhaps it’s strange that I ponder the steadfastness of the Lord thanks to a landscape that’s ever-shifting. Perhaps something as capricious as a tide shouldn’t make me think about His faithfulness. Or maybe it’s the contrast that makes the truth so bright.

Maybe it’s because, as ever-changing as this landscape is, it’s also everlasting in its changes, a cycle that doesn’t stop. And isn’t that like the Lord? He doesn’t always speak to us in the same ways, He doesn’t always answer prayers in the way we expect Him to, He doesn’t always give us the same thing in each season…but He’s always there. Always working. So big that He holds the universe in His palm, so exact that He knows how to speak to each heart in the way that will best help us.

His love never stops. And while in some seasons we might sense it like those towering trees or rolling mountains–always there, surrounding us–I think quite often we experience His love like a tide. Sometimes it’s surging high, sometimes our perception of it ebbs. But like the tide, it’s always there, always cycling, always moving. Like the tides, it never ends.

And like the landscape carved by those tides, we can let Him make us new every morning, just as His mercies are.

I love that these verses are from Lamentations, a book literally about grieving and mourning and calling out to the God that hasn’t forsaken His people, even when His people have forsaken Him. It’s in the midst of those tears that the prophet gives us this promise.

Great is His faithfulness. Morning by morning, new mercies are there for us to behold.

What do they look like today in your life?

Word of the Week – Parlor

Word of the Week – Parlor

by | Sep 21, 2026 | Word of the Week

Parlor might sound like an old-fashioned word to many of us…and I daresay we all think of the same thing when we hear it: a formal sort of living room in a Victorian house. Right?

That is certainly what the word has meant for much of its history, beginning as early as the 1500s. But before that, the word has a rather interesting history.

It traces its roots to the French word parler, which means “to speak.” If you’re like me, a lightbulb goes on in your head the second you make that connection. Because, of course! A parlor is a room where you sit and talk to people! The earliest use of the word for a room, however, was the French parleor, which was a courtroom or auditorium, back in Old French. 

When it traveled across the Channel to join the English language around the year 1200, it was used to refer not to a room but to the window through which confessions were made in a church. By 1300, it was used to refer to an apartment in a monastery where the monks could have conversations with people from the outside.

By the late 1300s, parlor became a room in a house rather than having religious connotations, and at first it was for “a room off a main hall offering privacy.” Then by the early 1400s, it was used as “a public room of a private house” (so a receiving room). Then it shifted to be a sitting room for the family.

Fast-forward to the 1880s, and it was being used to refer to a showroom for a business, like an ice cream parlor.

The Dim Mirror

The Dim Mirror

by | Sep 17, 2026 | Thoughtful Thursdays

More life lessons from watching beach sunrises incoming. Or rather, in this case, eternity lessons.

As I mentioned last week, watching the sunrise over the ocean in the Outer Banks is one of our favorite things to do on vacation. In years past, I would always wake Xoe up for it to (upon her request), and usually the wake-up call went something like: I’d shout, “We’ve got color!” toward her bedroom as I darted up the stairs to turn on the coffee pot.

We’d all go out to the deck, and Xoe would take over my phone and take a slew of photos as the sunrise evolved. We’d pick one to send to the grandmothers.

Well, Xoe is in her senior year of college right now and couldn’t join us, so she instead tasked me with the sacred duty: “Send me sunrise pictures!”

Guys…I am no photographer. And as I fuss with the camera on my phone, I realize anew that Xoe put a whole lot more effort into settings than I frankly know how to do. My photos just aren’t as gorgeous as hers were, even on the same device.

Instead, every morning I gasp at the beauty before me, at the range of colors–the gorgeous pinks, the lightening purples, the spilling gold. I raise my phone, I look at the screen and…I scowl. Pinks look orange. The sky looks brassy and yellow. Shadows look black instead of purple.

I know why. I know my phone’s light sensor reacts to the extreme brightness by dimming, to protect itself. I try fiddling a bit with the brightness, but I’m never happy with those results either, and…I give up, because I’d rather watch the actual beauty unfolding than miss it because I’m arguing with my phone’s camera.

This morning, though, as I set my phone aside, I couldn’t help but think that this problem, silly as it is, is a bit like a modern take on Paul’s dim mirror illustration.

See, back in the day when he was writing, mirrors were made of polished bronze, not the silver-backed glass we know today. If a high enough polish was achieved, you could see yourself in that mirror, yes…but it wasn’t the sort of reflection we’re used to. The colors would have been off. The image would have been darker than reality. You could get an impression of yourself…but not an exact likeness.

My phone camera attempting to capture the sunrise has those exact problems. Too dark. The colors are off. The pictures I’m taking and sending to my family give an impression of the beauty, and for those not here, they see that impression and respond with, “Wow, gorgeous!” without ever realizing how much better the real thing was.

And that is exactly what this life is, compared to eternity.

We think it’s beautiful–and it is.

We think it’s bright and brilliant–and it is.

We think it’s bursting with goodness and light–and it is.

But all that it is, all that we see, all that we are capable of perceving, all that we understand and experience…it’s filtered through our very human senses. And much like my phone’s camera, our senses come with protective sensors that dial back the true Light to keep from blinding us.

We know from the stories of Moses having to shroud his face that our eyes just can’t handle the glory of God. And not just our eyes–our minds. Our hearts. We can accept portions of it, of Him–slivers of His goodness, His radiance, His glory. We get glimpses, and those glimpses are enough to make us gasp in appreciation, to prostrate ourselves before Him, to hold out our hands and lift up our hearts and cry out, “Glory to God in the highest!”

But Paul tells us that we’re only seeing in a old bronze mirror, dimly. Our understanding is dim. Our perception is dim. Our knowledge is dim.

And yet most of the time, we’re content with that. We’re happy with our dull imitation of glory, because even it is beautiful. 

But what if we set aside our phones? Our dim mirrors? What if, instead of staring at this imitation as if it’s all there is, we remind ourselves to look up? Look out at the world beyond what we can see? What if we look away from the reflection and to what is being reflected?

His glory will blind us, yes. But that isn’t a bad thing. I’m sure you’ve noticed that you can look at a rising sun in a way you can’t a noonday one…and I’m sure you’ve also noticed that when you look away, you see a lot of spots.

Isn’t that exactly what we should be doing with the Lord? Staring at Him until, when we look away, we see those impressions of His light wherever we turn our gaze.

His light, imposed over our darkness. His goodness, blotting out our shadows. His promise, there wherever we turn our eyes.

These mirrors that we live are always going to be dim, compared to the eternity where He lives. Perhaps it’s all we can handle, most of the time. But praise God that He invites us to look away. To look up. To bask in the light of His face, through the One who tore the veil between us and ushers us into that light-infused sanctuary.

Word of the Week – Arcade

Word of the Week – Arcade

by | Sep 14, 2026 | Word of the Week

A few weeks ago, my husband and I were discussing words used for rooms or spaces that made no sense to us, and I brought up arcade. The only time I’ve really encountered this word “live,” so to speak, is in a video game arcade. So when I was researching Paris for The Collector of Burned Books and realized that an area of posh flats above the Champs-Elysee are also called “The Arcades,” I knew there had to be a meaning of this word that I didn’t know.

The word arcade has the hint of its root meaning right there in the word: arc, or arch. It’s from the Latin arcus, which then was used in the Italian arcata for an “arch of a bridge.” The French borrowed the word from there, using it to describe a vaulted space (hence those high-end apartments).

English adopted the word in 1731 with that same meaning and took to applying it to the spaces or passages formed by a succession of arches–think avenues of trees or a space beneath piers or pillars. By the late 1700s, it was used to refer to the spaces under a covered avenue that was lined with shops…and amusements. That’s ultimately where arcade games comes from, though that particular phrase dates only to 1977.

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