Welcome to the commentary for chapter two! Remember to post a comment in order to be entered in the drawing. Once all 19 commentaries are up one winner will be selected and they will receive signed copies of the first 3 books in the series.

On to discussing my thoughts and fun facts regarding chapter two!

This book departs from the pattern of the previous three books. When someone screams, there’s no one near by to come running and see what’s wrong! Isolation and what it means to be alone was one of the things I wanted to examine in this book. Sometimes, there’s no one there to catch you and you have only yourself and God to rely on to get you through.

I have personally had to call 911 once when in college. My roommates and I were living in a house that was off a long, windy road through pastureland and there was a sharp hairpin turn right by our driveway. One night we heard screeching brakes followed by a crash. My 2 roommates, who both had first aid experience and were members of ski patrols on Christmas break, went running down the hill while I was left to call 911. Fortunately, although the car was really messed up, the two guys who had been in it just had some cuts and bruises.

Whenever Cindy gets interviewed by police I comment that it seems to take forever. This is because it does. My husband once witnessed a purse snatching type event. He was far away and the robber had his back to him the entire time with a hood up. We still spent an hour repeating the thirty second story over and over again to the officers who arrived on the scene. They need to be thorough, ask every question in multiple ways to make sure that they’ve jogged your memory. Sometimes we don’t even realize what slight details could be important and so we dismiss them out of hand. I wrote the first couple of chapters of The Lord is My Shepherd soon after experiencing this. I was actually replicating the experience in the scene, but my editor (smart woman!) made me cut out two-thirds of it, because she felt (and rightly so) that readers wouldn’t want to read them asking Cindy the same questions over and over again with slightly altered wording.

Detective Kapono Robinson – not unusual in the islands to have your first name and your last name sound like they don’t belong together. People will have a Hawaiian first name and a European last name or vice-versa.

The hotel Cindy is staying at I have stayed in many, many times. It is right next door to the International Marketplace where there is AMAZING sushi incredibly cheap and Dole Whip. There’s also great shopping there.

I work really hard with my series to layer in things in earlier books that will become important in later books. (For example, the pub climax in book 3 was something I’d been foreshadowing since book 1.) Look for lots of layering in this chapter in the scenes with Jeremiah and Mark.

And those are my thoughts on chapter 2!