Came a Gentle Whisper: a Novel

An orphan, raised by her grandmother in the beautiful mountains of the Missouri Ozarks in the early 1900s, leaves the security of her idyllic secluded home and travels to Little Rock, Arkansas on a mission to help her friend, Ruby, only to find herself caught up in the seedy world of a speakeasy working as a dime-a-dance girl.Cora Lee wrestles with her need to find a “belongin’ place,” and her desire to stay “true to her raisin'” while learning to negotiate life in a rapidly changing world at the dawn of “The Jazz Age.” After facing unthinkable losses, overwhelming challenges, and the sting of social judgement, she must decide if she can stay true to her faith and her values while resisting the lure of sin, gin, and easy money, in the glitzy, superficial world of a big-city dance hall.All of her trials, though, pale in comparison when she hears that Walter, her childhood friend and the owner of her heart, the man who asked her to wait for him, has married a French woman while away in Europe fighting World War I. How will she be able to bear seeing him with another woman as his wife?And what will he think of her when he learns what she has become?