The Christian Mystery I Kept Reaching for on Quiet Evenings

There is a kind of evening, at sixty-six, that asks for a book and not much else. Supper is over. Glenn is in the other chair with the television on and not really watching it. The floor lamp is lit, the side table has my pencil and my little notebook on it, and I want a story I can trust. That is a smaller request than it sounds.

I spent thirty-one years putting books into the hands of students at a Christian school, and I have been retired from that library since 2022. In all that time I learned the hardest thing about Christian fiction is not finding it. It is finding the kind that does not preach at you, does not go thin on you halfway through, and does not turn out to be something you would not have handed a fourteen-year-old. So when I say I kept reaching for Colleen Coble on quiet evenings, I mean it as a compliment from a woman who is hard to please.

The book is Without a Trace, the first of the Rock Harbor novels, published by Thomas Nelson as a paperback of 303 pages. I bought my copy in the autumn of 2023 and read it that October. It is the only one of the five novels on my hall bookcase that I have gone back and read a second time. Coble had been recommended to me for years by women whose taste I trust, and I had put it off, which is a habit of mine when a series runs long.

What the listing promises is a search and rescue volunteer named Bree Nicholls, her search dog Samson, and a small town in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. What it delivers is that, with something steadier underneath. The dog is not a decoration. The town feels like a place with weather in it and people who have known each other too long to bother being polite. I read it in the green armchair by the front window, in the evenings after supper mostly, and finished inside my usual ten days. For me that is the mark of a book that holds.

I read it a second time in January of 2024, over a quiet week, because Dottie had picked it for the church book group and I wanted it fresh in my mind. We meet the second Tuesday of the month in the fellowship room, eight women and a pot of coffee, and I choose about half the books. That month I was not the one choosing. I was glad of it. I made one note in the notebook that week, a single line, and the line was that she gets the town right.

It is the only one of the five I have read twice, and I did not read it the second time for myself.

Now the honest part, because I promised myself when I started keeping these notebooks that I would always give the honest part. A grieving mother runs through the first chapters, and it is heavy. I do not say that as a criticism of Coble, who handles it with care, but as a warning to the reader who is deciding. One woman in our group lost a child years ago, and she sat that January out. She came in February and asked to borrow my copy, so she has not written the book off. She knew her own heart that month, and I think that was the right call.

The other thing I will say is about the series. There are seven Rock Harbor books and I have read three of them, in order, which is the only way I will read a series. The first does not tie every thread off neatly, and that is on purpose. If you need the whole thing closed on the last page, plan on the second book before you start the first. Dottie worked out the shape of it early, as she always does, and was pleased with herself for a fortnight.

Who I hand it to: a reader who wants a mystery with a dog in it, a small town with a past, and a stack of books waiting afterward. I have given it to two women since who do not usually read mysteries, and both finished it. Who I do not hand it to: a reader in a raw season, or one who wants a chase on every page. This is not that book. It is a slow build with people in it, and the people are the reason to stay.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you to read the look inside on the listing before you buy, because the opening chapters tell you whether the weight of it is more than you want on the evening in front of you. I would tell you that a book does not have to be light to be good, but it does have to be the right book on the right night. I would tell you that I have put this one into more hands than anything else on my shelf, and the women who loved it loved it for the dog and the town and the way Coble lets a person grieve on the page without turning the grief into a lesson. And I would tell you the thing I tell everybody at the kitchen table: if you start it and it is too much, set it down and try again in the spring. The book will keep. It kept for me.