"Insight" by Deborah Raney

Olivia Cline is giving up a job she loves in Chicago to follow her husband to the job of his dreams in the small Missouri town of Hanover Falls. Their marriage is recovering from her husband’s affair, and Olivia is hopeful for restoration and a new start. But the day she arrives in Hanover Falls, her husband is killed is an accidental gas explosion at the office.

Reed Vincent is an artist who lives and works in Hanover Falls. But he’s an artist with a serious problem – he’s losing his eyesight, and he needs to have corneal transplants to save it. Almost miraculously, he’s notified that transplants are available. As he recovers from the surgery, he realizes he needs an assistant to do the dozens of things he can’t while he recovers. And he hires Olivia.

It doesn’t take long to realize where Insight by Christian romance writer Deborah Raney is headed. The plot is straightforward; you know that Reed and Olivia will likely fall in love, that they’ll both be worried that it’s too soon and Olivia needs time to grieve, and that eventually they’ll both learn where the corneas came from for the transplants. All that said, the novel is still highly readable and difficult to put down because you want to see what happens next. 

And then Olivia discovers she’s pregnant with her dead husband’s child. That was something of an unexpected wrinkle.

Deborah Raney

Raney has published more than 30 books in the Christian romance genre. Her first book, A Vow to Cherish, was made into a movie starring Ken Howard and Barbara Babcock. She received numerous awards for her novels, incuding the Romance Writers of America RITA Award, the American Christian Fiction Writers Carol Award, the National Readers Choice Award, and the HOLT Medallion. She’s also been nominated for the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association’s Christy Award three times. She lives in Wichita, Kansas.

Insight rarely surprises, but it also doesn’t disappoint. We know things between Reed and Olivia will work themselves out. The enjoyment comes in watching how Raney makes that happen. 

Top photograph by David Besh via Unsplash. Used with permission.