The Serpent's Deception

Christian supernatural thriller centered on ancient spirits, oppression, and deliverance. Renee never grieved the daughter she lost, and something moved into the silence: a lust she'd once called freedom. What saves her marriage isn't a prayer alone. It's the truth, spoken until the house is theirs again.

Perfect for readers of Johanna Rojas Vann's Where Wilted Flowers Bloom, Frank Peretti's Piercing the Darkness, Brian Godawa's Chronicles of the Nephilim, and C.C. Warren's The Unfallen.

Nathaniel Cross closed his sister's case a year ago. He didn't expect the next one to test something in himself he thought he'd already answered.

Renee Castellano hasn't grieved the daughter she lost three years ago. She's just gone quiet about it and called that healing. Her husband Tom found the messages first, late at night, intimate, sent to someone who isn't him. Renee doesn't remember sending half of them.

Cross doesn't find an affair. He finds an older door. Long before Tom, before the baby she never let herself mourn, Renee spent her twenties chasing a different appetite on a crowded dance floor, calling it freedom when it was really lust wearing the shape of not wanting to be alone. Whatever got into her grief didn't need a new wound. It just found the lust she'd never actually closed, only outgrown.

Cross has his own door he's still watching. The need to be the one someone reaches for. Amos warned him about it before this case ever started, and every visit to the Castellano house tests whether the warning took.

Some hungers don't announce themselves as wanting more. They announce themselves as never quite being alone with the truth. Closing that door takes more than a prayer. It takes two people willing to say it out loud, to each other, before anything else.