The Search (Lancaster County Secrets)
Lainey O’Toole is harboring secrets that could tear Bertha Riehl’s family apart, but she’s inescapably drawn into their circle when young Bess Riehl arrives in Stony Ridge, Pennsylvania, to spend the summer with her grandmother. Raised in Berlin, Ohio, by her widowed carpenter father, 14-year-old Bess finds much to interest her at Rose Hill Farm, especially handsome Billy Lapp, the farmhand. And when Bertha gets herself and Bess arrested to convince her son to return home, Jonah and Lainey find themselves keeping company more and more often, although she’s necessarily cautious about sharing her thoughts with the one man she could hurt. Fisher’s newest Amish romance is set in 1972, which makes the casual treatment of her bone-marrow-transplant subplot somewhat problematic, but overall this is a thought-provoking contribution to the genre, especially as it taps into recurrent themes of modern American women converting to Anabaptist ways, and into questions of genetics and nature versus nurture. --Lynne Welch