✍️ Author:

      Riaan Schlebusch

🌱 Genre:

       Inspirational Christian Romantic Suspense

       Comparable To:

• The moral complexity of Charles Martin

• The coastal grit and quiet faith of Colleen Coble (but with literary restraint)

• The spiritual realism and trauma-informed hope of Katie Ganshert

• The restrained suspense and redemptive arcs of Susan Meissner

Theme:

Shadows of Mercy explores the redemptive power of truth spoken in community—not as a weapon, but as an act of mercy. At its core, the novel argues that silence, when weaponized by power, becomes complicity, while naming what is broken, especially the names of the erased, is the first step toward healing.

Interwoven with this are three key thematic threads:

1. Mercy as Active Presence – Mercy is not absolution without accountability, but the courageous choice to stay with the wounded, the guilty, and the forgotten, even when it costs you.

2. The Weight and Witness of Names – To say a name (Mateo Ramirez) is to resist erasure, to honor dignity, and to reclaim narrative from those who profit from silence. Names are not just memory. They are moral anchors.

3. Grace in the Fracture – Redemption is not found in pristine faith, but in the spiritual fractures of doubt, guilt, and institutional betrayal, where ordinary people choose, daily, to rebuild trust through small, stubborn acts of truth and tenderness.

These themes are rendered without preachiness, grounded instead in the weathered realism of a coastal town, the tactile weight of a child’s drawing, and the quiet courage of those who refuse to let the tide wash away what matters.

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Main Plot:

Haunted by survivor’s guilt and the unsolved death of his fellow Marine, Ethan Cole returns to the rain-swept coastal town of Hope Harbor with nothing but a sealed envelope bearing the name of Delaney Brooks, a grief counselor he’s never met. He intends only to disappear, but the past refuses to stay buried.

When a traumatized teenage boy washes ashore, mute and terrified, drawing images of a man with a scar and a mother “at the bottom of the sea,” Ethan recognizes the handiwork of Derek Kessler, a rogue ex-Marine tied to a black-market arms conspiracy that got his friend, Sgt. Mateo Ramirez, killed. Now Kessler is back, and using Ramirez’s sister, Sadie, and her son as leverage to bury the truth forever.

As federal agents close in and powerful forces move to discredit them, Ethan must choose: flee the life he’s begun to rebuild or stand with Delaney, Sadie, and the boy to expose a cover-up that reaches into the highest ranks of military command. But speaking the truth comes at a cost, threatening Delaney’s career, Mateo’s safety, and Ethan’s fragile hope for redemption.

In a town where secrets wash ashore like driftwood, Ethan learns that mercy isn’t found in silence, but in the courage to say a name the world tried to erase… and to stay, even when the tide turns against you.

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Setting:

Shadows of Mercy is set in the fictional coastal town of Hope Harbor, Oregon, a windswept, rain-drenched community where the Pacific Ocean meets dense pine forests and weathered docks. The setting is not merely a backdrop, but a living, breathing presence that mirrors the novel’s emotional and spiritual landscape.

Key elements of the setting:

• Atmosphere: Moody, cinematic realism, constant mist, driving rain, gray skies, and the low groan of buoys create a world steeped in melancholy and quiet tension. Light is scarce but meaningful: harbor lamps at dusk, firelight in the café, the sudden break of sun after a storm.

• Key Locations:

  • The Lighthouse Café: The moral heart of the town, warm, cluttered, fragrant with coffee and stew. Run by Mara Veldt, it serves as a sanctuary, command center, and family table.

  • The North Dock: Where truth is spoken, names are reclaimed, and key confrontations unfold against the raw power of the sea.

  • The Buoy Shed & Dunes: Isolated, liminal spaces where danger surfaces and reckonings occur.

  • St. Brigid’s Church: Plain, unadorned, with clear-glass windows, reflecting the story’s rejection of religious cliché in favor of grounded, human spirituality.

  • The Garage Apartment: Ethan’s sparse refuge above the café, symbolizing his liminal state between exile and belonging.

• Tone & Texture: The setting embodies South African realism transplanted to the Pacific Northwest, not through overt cultural markers, but through its focus on spatial contrasts (exposure vs. shelter, sea vs. shore), institutional fractures, and the quiet resilience of ordinary people amid systemic brokenness.

Hope Harbor is more than a town. It’s a character: watchful, wounded, and ultimately redemptive. It doesn’t offer easy escapes, but it does offer ground to stand on, if you’re willing to stay.

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Tone:

Gritty yet hopeful, moody but redemptive, and relentlessly human.

The tone of Shadows of Mercy is defined by cinematic realism and emotional restraint, eschewing melodrama, sentimentality, and overt religiosity in favor of quiet intensity, sensory detail, and moral complexity.

• Visually: Cold blue and gray palettes dominate, rain-streaked windows, mist over the harbor, the dull gleam of wet asphalt, punctuated by rare, resonant warmth: firelight in the café, the amber glow of streetlamps at dawn, the soft gold of a single candle in a darkened room.

• Emotionally: Grief is visceral but not indulgent; trauma is carried in the body (a flinch, a tightened jaw, a hand that won’t stop trembling), not in internal monologue. Love is shown through action, shared silence, a thermos of coffee left on a step, a knife handed across a threshold—not grand declarations.

• Spiritually: Faith is present but unobtrusive, woven into choices, not creeds. Mercy is not a feeling, but a discipline. Redemption is hard-won, communal, and often messy. There are no doves, no open Bibles, no sudden conversions, only people choosing, again and again, to stay when it would be easier to run.

• Pacing: Suspense is taut but patient, building through implication and atmosphere rather than action alone. The tension lives in what’s unsaid, a glance held too long, a photo pinned to a bulletin board, a name whispered in the dark.

Overall, the tone honors the novel’s core paradox: in the deepest shadows, mercy is not soft. It is sharp, necessary, and fiercely protective. And in Hope Harbor, that’s enough to call grace.

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Chapter Count:

25 chapters

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Page Count:

172 Pages

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Book Blurb:

A debt. A name. A silence that won’t stay buried.

Ethan Cole returns to the rain-lashed coast of Hope Harbor with blood on his hands, a dead Marine’s secret in his pocket, and a promise he can’t keep alone. All he wants is to disappear, but the past has other plans.

When a scarred ex-comrade surfaces with a chilling threat, and a traumatized boy draws visions only Ethan can decipher, he’s forced to confront the truth he’s spent eight years running from. Standing between him and justice: a grieving counselor who sees his wounds but won’t let him hide, a sister who swam through stormwater to protect her son, and a town that remembers too much, and forgives too slowly.

In a seaside community where secrets wash ashore like driftwood, Ethan must choose: vanish again, or stand and say the name that could destroy him, or finally set them all free.

From award-winning Christian fiction author Riaan Schlebusch comes a masterful blend of spiritual suspense and literary grit, a story where mercy isn’t given lightly, truth costs everything, and redemption is forged not in grand gestures, but in the quiet courage to stay.

Perfect for fans of The Things We Cannot Say and The Prisoner’s Wife, Shadows of Mercy is a haunting, hopeful debut that lingers long after the final page, where faith is tested in the dark, and grace arrives not with fanfare, but with a single, stubborn act of remembrance.

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Epilogue:

Six months later, the dunes were green.

Not the hard green of summer, but the soft, rain-washed jade of early spring, marram grass swaying in the salt wind, wildflowers pushing through the sand like quiet promises kept. Ethan stood at the edge of the ridge, hands in his pockets, watching the tide roll in clean and steady.

Behind him, footsteps.

Delaney stopped beside him, her wedding band catching the low afternoon sun. She didn’t speak. Just leaned into his shoulder, her presence as familiar now as his own breath.

“They broke ground on the new VA wing yesterday,” she said after a while. “The one named for Mateo.”

“I saw the photos.” He looked at her. “You okay?”

She nodded. “Sadie’s giving the keynote. Mateo’s drawing the dedication mural.”

He almost smiled. “He’s not just remembering anymore. He’s building.”

“Yeah.” She turned to him. “And you?”

He looked out at the sea, no longer a grave, not even a mirror, but simply water, vast and honest. “I slept through the night. Again.”

“Good.”

They stood in silence, the kind that no longer hurt.

Then, from the path below, a voice called up: “Ethan! Delaney!”

Mateo stood at the base of the dunes, sketchbook in hand, Sadie beside him, her hair loose in the wind.

“You coming?” Sadie asked.

Ethan took Delaney’s hand. “Yeah.”

As they walked down to meet them, the sun broke through the clouds, thin, golden, unbroken. Mateo held up a new drawing, still wet with ink.

It showed the four of them on the dunes, backs to the viewer, facing the open sea. But this time, there was no bridge, no net, no ledger.

Just the horizon.

And beneath it, one word:

Forward.

Ethan looked at the boy. “You sure?”

Mateo nodded. “The past is named. Now we live.”

And as the four of them walked back toward town, toward the café’s warm light, the outreach center’s open door, the ordinary grace of a life built on truth, Ethan knew:

The shadows hadn’t vanished.

But Mercy had learned to walk in daylight.

And in Hope Harbor, that was enough.