Last Safe Place, The (43 page)

Sudan 2000.

Hiding in the chaos of a civil war, the Arab government of the largest nation in Africa has practiced a ruthless program of systematic genocide and more than two million southern Sudanese tribal people have been massacred. But American human rights journalist Ron Wolfson isn’t in Sudan to cover the war. He’s risking his life there to chase a different story—reports of a massive government-assisted slave trade.

When Arab Murahaleen guerrillas attack a small village and kidnap a little girl named Akin to sell on the slave market in the North, her father, Idris, goes after her and Ron joins the simple villager in his desperate effort to rescue his child. While Ron’s brother, a U.S. congressman, battles indifference to force international political pressure on the Sudanese government, Ron finds the story he’s been looking for and suffers the brutal retaliation of a slave trader.

On the eve of the sanctions vote in the U.S. House of Representatives, the lives of Ron and Idris hang by a thread, their fate in the hands of a bloodthirsty mercenary and an orphan boy. But even if they survive, is it already too late to save little Akin from the brutal horror her master has panned for her?

(Click the links below to:)

Sign up for email list

to get free books, special offers, "insider" info on upcoming books.

Read Chapter One

Book Trailer

(Click here.)

On August 11, 1969, two anguished voices on opposite sides of the planet cry out in terror at the exact same instant and their desperate pleas release a strange power. That power will change the destiny of a West Virginia family in a strip mined hollow that lies in the shadow of a 300-million-gallon coal slag lake—held in place by a makeshift dam high on the mountainside.

Grayson Addington

…returns from Vietnam to his wife, Piper, and 2-year-old daughter a broken man, ravaged by post traumatic stress syndrome, a chaplain who left his faith in the jungle mud with his massacred unit.

Piper Addington

… doesn’t know her husband anymore. In his absence, she turned to his brother Carter for support. Now, she must choose between them.

Carter Addington

…is in love with Piper and intends to have her by framing the shell-shocked returning soldier for a heinous crime he didn’t commit.

Maggie

…is a mystery. A strange, battered child with amnesia, she shows up on Piper’s porch and instantly bonds to Sadie, a cripplingly shy toddler. When Maggie runs away and takes Sadie with her, the warring brothers must team up to search for them, unaware that Piper’s raging older brother is also in the woods—with a deer rifle, intent on shooting Carter and Grayson on sight.

But something more than chance has brought the child called Maggie to this wounded family. And nothing less than destiny will be fulfilled by her incredible sacrifice…

… on the foggy morning when the makeshift dam on the mountain above them explodes.

(Click the links below to:)

to be notified when When Butterflies Cry is available, to get free books, special offers, "insider" info on upcoming books.

Read Chapter One

T
HE
L
AST
S
AFE
P
LACE

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to thank Young Life and the staff of Frontier Ranch, the Young Life camp located in a 9,500-foot hanging valley on the side of Mount Princeton, for granting me access to the
real
chalet in the
real
bristlecone pine forest above the camp at 12,000 feet. Standing there in the cold wind after a summer storm, I stared across the valley at Mount Antero and this story was born.

Dedication

For Tom, my rock and inspiration always.

Ninie Hammon spent 25 years as a professional journalist, worked her way up from a reporter to a publisher who started her own newspaper. But that was before she tried her hand at fiction and discovered making up the facts was waaay more fun than reporting them. She became a novelist then and she has never looked back.

Her first book, a biography published by Penguin Putnam’s Berkeley imprint, was followed by seven novels published by Bay Forest books. Each of her novels is a fast-paced, riveting tale of ordinary people who are forced by circumstances to fight for their lives, gloriously complex characters who grab the reader by the lapels and drag him into the story to live it with them.

Ninie grew up in Muleshoe, Texas, and says she now lives “somewhere in the sky over Greenland.” She and her husband, Tom, travel back and forth between their home in Louisville, KY and one in the village of Great Linford in Buckinghamshire north of London where Tom directs Young Life in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Scandinavia. The couple has six children and eight grandchildren.

Ninie would love to connect with you on her website,
niniehammon.com
. You can also find there links to other social media where she can chat with you.

Copyright © 2012 Ninie Hammon

For full copyright information,
click here.

All covers by DogEared Design.

Please turn the page for Amazon’s
“Before You Go”
feature. Thanks!